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Category: Institutions

Half-done

Morning all.  This is the last blog before my usual summer break.  Service should resume on Monday, August 31st.  If you don’t hear from me then, check your spam box: often after I take a break, spam filters stop letting this e-mail through.  One housekeeping note: the pandemic has played hell with everyone’s usual schedule and one thing that got bumped on our end (because we reckoned everyone was too busy to pay attention) was the  second edition of our

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June 18, 2020 No Comments

Re-Setting Strategy After a Punch in the Mouth

A great nineteenth-century expert on strategy, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, credited his success over Napoleon to resiliency.  Bonaparte, he said “planned campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harnesses. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on.” There’s a twentieth-century equivalent, too.  In the words of the great twentieth-century

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June 4, 2020 1 Comment

WIL is the Way

One of the lasting impacts of the COVID virus is going to be the destruction it has wrought in the youth labour market.  There are two main problems: first, the virus has most strongly affected the tourist and service industries in which students most commonly find work, and second, the recession is inevitably going to play havoc with the kinds of entry level jobs that young graduates normally get.  What should universities and colleges do? Simple: double down on work-integrated

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June 1, 2020 1 Comment

The Outlook for International Students

Everyone is wondering: what’s going to happen to enrolments in the fall?  Particularly, international enrolments?  It’s a big question because for the last decade pretty much 100% of all the increase in institutional income has come from fee income, much of it from international students.  Take that income away, and we’re talking about major cuts: in Australia, which is only slightly more international fee-dependent than Canada, the hit to the sector this term is estimated at over $5 billion.  Some

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May 20, 2020 1 Comment

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
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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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