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Category: Institutions

How Open to Be

Last week saw a slew of universities “announce” their plans for the summer.  Some of them appear to be treating it as a strategic exercise in getting one over on competitors (“look how open we are!”), but with one or two exceptions, this exercise is probably a misreading of the situation: pretty much everyone is going to be massively online/remote for the fall.  Going remote, to be clear, is a good thing.  I know that some people like making distinctions

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May 19, 2020 1 Comment

Community vs. Community

 I have remarked several times over the past few weeks about the need for community during the transition.  It will be disastrous for universities and colleges as educational communities to go back in a way that includes only certain people.  If international students, students living with elderly relatives, students with compromised immune systems or students with disabilities are either not invited back at the same time as everyone else, or are only offered a continuation of remote classes while others

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May 7, 2020 3 Comments

Comparative Bailouts

Following yesterday’s discussion re: how we might want to ask for money, I thought it would be useful to look at how other national governments are responding to post-secondary pleas for help.  For obvious reasons, the focus here is on countries which rely on private funding (i.e. fees) to fund their systems, as publicly-funded systems aren’t immediately affected by changes in student demand and can borrow to cover shortfalls. Let’s start over the pond in the UK, where the Universities

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May 5, 2020 No Comments

An Open Letter to Provosts and Presidents

Le français suit l’anglais Good morning, everyone.  Today’s blog is a bit different from the usual format.  I am here to ask you all to participate in an act of radical self-interest. A few weeks ago, I suggested that the biggest problem Canadian universities would face this fall was working out how to deliver those big, ugly first-year classes online.  I also suggested that many of those big first year-courses cover similar topics (e.g. Microeconomics 100, Introduction to Physics, etc.) and

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April 30, 2020 4 Comments

Coronavirus (19, but Time is a Flat Circle). Shovel This.

Today I want to talk about economic stimulus and what that is likely to look like for universities and colleges. To be clear, the $100 billion plus in money which has gone out the door so far in emergency benefits, wage subsidies, and various other programs, is not stimulus.  What we are doing now is – in the words of the excellent Jennifer Robson – more like inducing a medical coma; keep the patient (the economy) in a kind of low-functioning stasis

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April 22, 2020 No 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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