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Category: Institutions

Two Advances in Research Rankings

Hi all. Just a quick one today, bringing you up to date with a couple of new and interesting developments in the field of research rankings. The first has to do with the sudden rise of “Open” bibliometric data. To date, all of the major research rankings have used data from one of the two major publishers: Elsevier or Clarivate (formerly known as Thompson Reuters). No surprise here: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science are the main collators of

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November 12, 2024 3 Comments

Global Rankings Update 2024

Global Rankings Update 2024 Morning all. There are so many international rankings to track from one year to another that it’s easy to go a little glassy-eyed. So now that the 2025 Times Higher World Rankings are out, I thought I would do a little round up. Let’s start with how Canadian institutions did on the “Big Three” research rankings: The Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE), and the QS World

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November 11, 2024 2 Comments

The Road Ahead for International Students

You could be forgiven if, after the last few months, you thought that Canadian post-secondary institutions should be turning their attention away from international students. But nothing could be further from the truth. The underlying dynamics of international student recruitment have not changed—institutions still need money and provincial governments are basically united in their determination to prevent them from getting it from domestic sources—only the tactics going forward have. Let’s start on the college side. Their business has mostly been

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November 5, 2024 2 Comments

Enshittification as a Strategy

Many of you seem amused by my use of the term “enshittification” (“word of the year” for 2023 by the American Dialect Society) to describe much of what is going on in Canadian higher education a the moment. I suspect just as many of you dislike my use of the term (hi, Mom!), but I’m going to keep using it anyway because it so concisely expresses today’s state of affairs. Technically, I am using the term incorrectly. When Cory Doctorow first

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November 4, 2024 7 Comments

Raison d’être

Yesterday I discussed and advocated for visioning exercises, particularly if your institution is about to undergo some radical changes. It is a lot easier to navigate a storm if you know where you’re going in the first place. Everyone in a university needs to be able to answer the question Why does this institution exist? What’s your raison d’être? To some of you, I expect that this question sounds stupid. Obviously, the answer is some kind of mix of “teaching,

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October 30, 2024 3 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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