Category: Institutions

Laurentian Blues (1)

Laurentian University will run out of cash at the end of February.  That’s the most important – but far from only – take-away of the Monitor’s Report filed Monday in an Ontario court as Laurentian University filed for creditor protection. People are throwing around words like “unprecedented” to describe what is happening at Laurentian.  I’m always careful about that because before WWII a lot of wild things happened in Canadian universities (the Honorary Bursar making off with the entire University

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Some Surprising Applications Data

Canada, as I think everyone is, on the whole, in the main, crap at educational data.  When it comes to getting up-to-the-minute data on things like enrolments and applications, we’re mostly hopeless, because everyone does their own thing and nobody bothers to make their data public or comparable until Statscan comes along 28 or months or so after the fact.  There are only two major exceptions to this: the Atlantic Association of Universities, which puts out a super-speedy enrolment check

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Memo to Minister Nicolaides

To: Demetrios Nicolaides, Minister of Advanced Education, Alberta From: That guy from HESA Towers Dear Minister, So, you have finally got to the end of the Alberta 2030 Process.  Congratulations!  The question now is: where do you go from here? When the UCP came to power, it had two fundamental aims with respect to higher education: reduce government expenditures to fit the province’s new post-oil-bust financial circumstances and make institutions more active partners in the province’s economic development.  Both were entirely

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What People Are Complaining About When They Complain About Performance-Based Funding

If you are a faithful reader of this blog, you’ll know I am not a big fan of the Performance-Based Funding (PBF) systems being developed by the governments of Alberta and Ontario (though the latter is a bit less hopeless than the former).  But unlike many who oppose these initiatives, I don’t think PBF is a bad idea in principle: I’ve written quite extensively about why they’re a good idea, at least when designed correctly.  Today I want to talk about

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