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Category: Institutions

Letter from Japan

Morning all.  I’m in the midst of a couple of weeks in Japan (the sumo was fun, thanks, though the overall quality of the field is pretty weak since Hakuho retired and Terunofuji’s knees gave out) and though this trip has absolutely nothing to do with work, I have nevertheless had thoughts about the country and its higher education system. Here’s the thing about Japan: it used to be the future.  It’s not anymore.  Go back to the early 1990s

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March 20, 2023 No Comments

International Women’s Day 2023

Today is a statistical overview for International Women’s Day. Let’s start by looking at student numbers.  Figure 1 gives us the long view on female participation in universities (sorry college folks: Statscan data for your sector is a mess prior to the 1990s).  Women represented about 20% of university students from the 1920s to the mid-1950s, apart from the years during World War 2.  Starting around 1955, women’s share of total enrolments began a steady climb.  By 1989, women passed

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March 8, 2023 No Comments

Plus ça change

I was recently reading this great book of essays edited by Philip Altbach (if you are studying higher education and have never read Altbach, you are should immediately read everything by Altbach) entitled University Reform.  It’s a great read, in particular the introduction, which lists the nine challenges facing higher education systems around the world.  They are: Some of these nine challenges overlap a bit (for instance, “relevance” and “the changing role”) and others are linked closely (growing enrolments, financial

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February 21, 2023 No Comments

Improving Quality Without Increasing Professional Workloads

Yesterday, I spoke about the desirability of changing the nature of academic work – specifically, dividing the assessment part of the job from the instructional part by creating a group of employees that focus on assessment – to use resources more efficiently.  Today, I want to talk about how to further tweak the academic job description and deploy academic resources to significantly improve the student learning environment, without (hopefully) increasing the burden on professors. The over-riding goal is to make

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February 15, 2023 3 Comments

Reducing Work

Recently, I asked my Twitter followers who taught in universities about the part of their job they liked the least.  I asked because I am pretty convinced Canadian higher education isn’t going to get through the next decade or so without some reasonably big changes in the way faculty spend their time. Here’s my basic assumption: as I noted back here, we’re on the brink of a pretty big increase in youth numbers. The best guess is that the number

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February 14, 2023 3 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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