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Category: Institutions

Buckets and Pillars

We’ve been working hard at HESA Towers the last couple of weeks on strategic plans (currently at Queen’s and Memorial).  One of my colleagues, Michael Savage, has been working on some comparative work on strategic plans, some of which we’ll tell you about tomorrow.  But I wanted to talk about something we’ve noticed in the way Canadian strategic plans are put together.  And that is the difference between “bucket” plans and “pillar” plans. Generally, strategic plans all contain three things. 

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September 28, 2020 1 Comment

The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, 2020

Our annual publication, The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, is out today.  You can read it here.  Consider it your free annual almanac of everything PSE-related in Canada.  If you have any suggestions for improvement in future years, please let me know. This is an odd year to be writing almanac-like documents.  Normally, you can look forward to future events by relying on data that are a couple of years old.  Partly, it’s from necessity, thanks to Canada’s lackadaisical

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September 16, 2020 2 Comments

Micro-credentials Need to be More than Gimmicks

If you’re one of those unfortunate people who follows the federal lobbying scene, you’ll have noticed that all of the PSE stakeholder groups, one way or another, are currently pitching micro-credentials to the feds either as “a contribution” PSE institutions are making to skills acquisition in the country (CICan) or as something the government should pay for by tacking on some kind of voucher to the CERB (Universities Canada, U15, and Polytechnics Canada).  I have three reactions to this. First,

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September 14, 2020 3 Comments

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
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One Thought to Start Your Day

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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