Category: Institutions

The Auditor General on Laurentian

Last Wednesday, the Ontario Auditor-General (AG) released a damning interim report on the Laurentian insolvency.  Because of its interim nature – the AG does not think it likely her office will finish a full report before the Legislature is prorogued for the June election – it does not do justice to the subject.  However, it does make three specific claims, which I think are hugely important and could pave the way for some key resignations at Laurentian.    For some time, I

Read More »

World Higher Education: Institutions, Students and Funding

Good morning, all.  Today – FINALLY – marks the release of World Higher Education: Institutions, Students, Funding, which I have been co-authoring with HESA’s Jonathan Williams for the better part of three years now (Jonathan did most of the heavy lifting).  You can find the full report, as well as national profiles for each of the 56 countries included in the analysis, right here.  If you are a regular reader, you know a lot of the narratives.  In previous blog

Read More »

Higher Education Institutions Worldwide

By Alex Usher and Jonathan Williams There are lots of estimates of higher education students around the world, which vary based on whether they include students in more vocational programs (the global total is somewhere in the high 200 millions if you do, and low 200 millions if you don’t).  But one thing you won’t see very often is an estimate of the number of higher education institutions.  And the reason for that is that pretty simple: big international data

Read More »

International Student Externalities

You may have seen the news from California regarding a lawsuit by a well-to-do Berkeley resident against the University of California which has forced the latter to reduce its 2022 enrolment by 2,600 students.  Basically, the plaintiff – a well-to-do local who spends half his time in Nelson, New Zealand – said that too many students were destroying the neighbourhood and sued the university over its enrolment plans, using the California Environmental Quality Act.   A lower court agreed with the

Read More »

Enhancing Quality

We’ve got a provincial election in Ontario in something like 100 days (as if Omicron and Ukraine weren’t depressing enough), so I thought I would put out a policy suggestion with respect to higher education that all parties could follow, if they were so inclined.  Specifically, a suggestion with how to promote quality in universities. To give you a little bit of background, in Ontario “quality assurance” takes one of two forms.  If you are a new organization trying to

Read More »