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Category: Institutions

Can Universities Compete?

There’s a basic problem with trying to get universities to compete with one another: most of them are structurally incapable of following any coherent competitive strategy at all. Michael Porter posited that there were basically three generic types of competitive strategies.  Those competing on a broad scale could compete on cost (e.g., WalMart), or they could compete on product differentiation that allows them to charge a premium (e.g., Apple, Mercedes-Benz).  A third option is to limit oneself to a particular

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December 14, 2011 5 Comments

A University of the North?

Every so often, the idea of a “University of the North/Arctic” pops up. Last month, it was the new Yukon Premier making the case for one. A lot of the rhetoric around the idea of a northern university has been along the lines of “other northern countries have them and it’s embarrassing that we don’t” (the Walter Gordon Foundation has issued a cute map to make this point visually). Let’s ignore the facts that (i) the Walter Gordon map includes

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December 13, 2011 2 Comments

College Tuition: More than you Think

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single student in possession of a modest fortune pursues studies at college, not university. If it is so, it is because of another truth universally acknowledged: that college is cheaper than university. Or is it? While Statistics Canada does a bang-up job collecting university tuition and fee data, weighting them carefully by enrolment patterns and reporting averages by province, level and discipline, no such mechanism exists for college studies. In fairness, the

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December 2, 2011 1 Comment

Rankings Indigestion

The easiest knock on rankings like those produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is that they only measure research, and that universities are about much more than just research. That’s absolutely true, of course, but to my mind it also reflects a general unwillingness to come to grips with what an odd, hybrid of an organization higher education really is. Go back two hundred years and universities were nearly irrelevant as institutions. The decline of the church had robbed the

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November 29, 2011 No Comments

The New AUCC

Reading through a couple of recent AUCC initiatives – notably: the “five commitments”and its new brochure on the value of universities, it occurred to me how much AUCC’s focus seems to have changed in the last few years. Though it hasn’t really been remarked upon, there seems to be a slow but dramatic shift in the way higher education lobbying occurs in Ottawa. As late as 2000, AUCC still had an unrivalled lobbying presence in Ottawa. Individual institutions were starting

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November 22, 2011 No Comments
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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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