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Category: Institutions

UBC Expanding

A couple of weeks ago, the University of British Columbia issued a press release, which read: The University of British Columbia is expanding its presence south of the Fraser River with the $70-million purchase of a property in Surrey. Whoo!  Big bucks!  Can’t go wrong buying property in the Lower Mainland, right?  Seems like this could just be a good long-term financial play. I mean, why tie up your investments entirely in equities when property is so hot?          UBC

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November 22, 2021 7 Comments

Lock-in

One of the most interesting topics in economic geography is “lock-in”:  that is, the tendency of a region to double-down on a particular set of industries/technologies.   Generally, the term is used in a negative fashion: that is, the doubling-down is done unwisely, when said industries and technologies are becoming uncompetitive and/or heading for obsolescence.  It’s easy enough to understand why regions do this: if they have specialized in a particular area, it’s because at one point they had a big

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November 16, 2021 2 Comments

Bring Back the Transparency Debate

In 1991, Maclean’s began publishing university rankings.  In doing so, it relied heavily on university co-operation: in particular, it required institutions to fill in a survey for various pieces of data on admissions, class sizes, etc.  Not all the questions were particularly well-defined and so there was a lot of data gaming.  Eventually, in 2006, the universities decided they were not going to play the game any more: they were going to get out of the rankings business and instead set up

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November 15, 2021 1 Comment

The University of Austin

So, some of you may have seen the kerfuffle about the creation of a new university “dedicated to the truth” (see the NYT article here).  This initiative, unconventionally announced to the world via a Medium blogpost, is to be led by the former President of St. John’s College (Annapolis) Pano Kanelos, but he has accumulated a very large number of backers, both in terms of finances and “people who matter”.  This latter group includes a wide variety of people, some of

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November 11, 2021 3 Comments

Labour Scarcity and Higher Education

A few weeks ago, the economist Armine Yalnizyan penned a really good piece for The Star. It examined  epoch-defining shift in “developed” economies from a world in which labour is plentiful and capital is in short supply, to one in which capital is plentiful and the competition is for labour.  This will have profound effects on higher education, which I don’t think many in the sector have absorbed. The upshot is this: we are going into a period where labour

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November 8, 2021 2 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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