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Category: Institutions

Where the Living is Easy

Before Christmas, I made a bit of a fuss about the six Ontario Colleges who had made deals with private career colleges in the GTA to teach international students.  The previous provincial government had decided to shut these agreements down because they seemed to pose systemic reputation risks to Ontario colleges, but the new one decided not only to leave them alone but to allow those colleges to double down on them, ostensibly on the grounds that they all really, really

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January 14, 2020 2 Comments

College Finance Data 2017-18

Morning.  Just after the blog closed for the holidays, Statistics Canada did its annual release of data from the FINCOL survey (that’s the one that asks colleges about their income and expenditure, just like FIUC does for universities, only in a lot less detail).  So, as usual, I thought I would give you a look into the data. Let’s start with the big picture.  Nationally, revenue at colleges increased by 2.8% after inflation, which is pretty good.  It’s not quite the 7%

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January 9, 2020 No Comments

Time Horizons for Strategic Plans

One of the oddest conventions in strategic planning – in higher education, anyway – is that Strategic Plans should last for five years.  I know of no reason why five years is considered a standard length of measurement other than that when Stalin decided to resume planning in 1928 after the “pause” of the New Economic Policy and the defeat of his left-wing opponents Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, he decided to do so in five-year increments.  After that, pretty much

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November 26, 2019 2 Comments

Strategic Planning for Ambiguous Organizations

I have been doing a fair bit of strategic planning work recently and one mantra that people like repeating when it comes this kind of exercise is “we’re not like a business, so we can’t plan like a business”.  I get why people say this, but they’re wrong.  Or rather, they’re right, but not for the reasons they think. When people say that “universities aren’t businesses”, mostly what they are thinking is that universities aren’t interested in profit, per se.  But

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November 25, 2019 2 Comments

The Making of the Modern University

I have spent a godawful amount of time on planes this week, going to Malawi and back for a meeting concerning the African Centres of Excellence project.  It’s given me a lot of time to catch up on reading (two recommendations for African fiction: The Grub Hunter by Amir Tag Elser is good, but Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto is great).  But one book in particular I thought I should mention to y’all is The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the

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November 22, 2019 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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