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Category: Institutions

Ant Colonies and the Art of Managing Universities

One of the problems in being a university manager is this assumption that being in charge of all or part of an organization means you actually have some control over what goes on inside it.  But this is not, in fact, true, or at least not in the way that anyone outside academia would understand the word “control”.  This is because individual universities are basically ants.  Individual biological entities?  Certainly.  But more importantly, they are part of a larger colony

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October 1, 2019 3 Comments

Sagas and Plots

Late last year I wrote about Burton Clark and the notion of “organizational sagas”; that is, the stories people in organizations…

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September 20, 2019 3 Comments

Developments in Ontario’s Performance-Based Financing System

Good morning all. Today, the CD Howe Institute is releasing a paper I wrote on Performance-Based Financing (PBF) called Funding for Results in Higher Education. It’s a quick tour through the various ways that performance-based financing works around the world—in France, Germany, Scandinavia, as well as the United States—as well as some analysis of what we know of the PBF scheme that Ontario is theoretically implementing over the next couple of years. (NB: The Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities

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September 17, 2019 No Comments

Honing the University Party’s Growth Agenda

It’s election season, and so everyone is trotting out promises and coming up with manifestos. These manifestos are lists of specific promised policy initiatives, but they are also – implicitly – a description of how a political party sees the world – how it conceives of a better society and what steps it thinks are needed to get there.   Universities are not political parties, of course, but if we look at what they and their representative bodies in Ottawa (Universities

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September 16, 2019 1 Comment

Canadian University Expenses, 2017-18

Good morning.  Yesterday, I examined recent trends in income at Canadian universities; today I want to take a look at what is happening on the expenditures side. Let’s start by looking at expenditures by type.  Universities are labour-intensive places, with 58% of total expenditures devoted to labour of one sort or another (if we were to look just at operating expenditures, it would be higher).  About 12% goes into new buildings, building renovations, utilities and general upkeep.  Nine percent is

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September 13, 2019 2 Comments

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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