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Category: Institutions

Institutional Economic Impact Statements Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at how Economic Impact Statements are put together.  Today, we want to look at the uses and misuses of these statements. Let’s start by acknowledging that these statements are not primarily designed to be objective, academic analyses of impact.  Rather, they are political documents, meant to put an institution in a good light.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but it means that they need to be read with a certain eye.  Given the built-in incentive to exaggerate

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November 18, 2020 1 Comment

Institutional Economic Impact Statements: The Basics

For all sorts of reasons, higher education institutions find the need to “show value”.  One of the ways they do this is through economic impact statements.  My HESA Towers colleague Michael Savage has been doing a review of these across Canada and in a couple of other countries and has come up with a really simple framework for thinking about them. Today and tomorrow we’ll be taking an in-depth look at what these documents can and cannot actually explain. Ready? 

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November 17, 2020 1 Comment

Performance and Accountability in a Pandemic

It is a disappointing time for those of us who value accountability.  Governments across the country (outside the Atlantic, anyway) are failing us – badly – in their pandemic responses.  And yet, apparently there are no political consequences for their shameful performance and the accompanying body count.  The Ford and Legault governments, with close to 10,000 deaths between them, are rising high in the polls.  Because everyone (again, if you ignore the Atlantic provinces) is making similar pig-headed mistakes, everyone

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November 9, 2020 No Comments

Canada Christian College

There has been some brouhaha in Ontario about Canada Christian College (CCC), an evangelical school in Whitby, being given the title “university” and being “allowed to offer degrees”.  There is both less and more to this story than meets the eye.  Allow me to walk you through it. Let’s start at the beginning: when does a university become a university and who gets to grant degrees in Ontario?  Well, until 2000, you needed an Act of the Legislature.  CCC received

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November 3, 2020 No Comments

Arresting Decline

As I noted yesterday, the Canadian post-secondary sector seems to be in a deep public funding rut. We’re in the 12th year of flat budgets, and no political party – whether in government or opposition – seems inclined to reverse this.  What to do?   Well, in the strategic planning business, the first thing you look for are goals.  The second thing you look for are barriers to those goals.  So, let’s try that out by confronting why no government wants to

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October 22, 2020 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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