Category: Institutions

A Taxonomy of Private Universities

When people hear the words “private higher education”, most North Americans’ imaginations immediately jump to one of two mental images: prestigious Ivy League universities, or predatory chains of private colleges like ITT Technical Institutes or Corinthian Colleges or something like that.  But private higher education globally is actually more varied than this.  Let’s take a quick tour. Prestigious Private Non-Profits.  These are your Harvards, your Stanfords, your MITs.  Outside the United States, these are pretty rare: Japan has a few (Waseda, Keio), and there

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Aurora College

The Government of the Northwest Territories published a Foundational Review of Aurora College, which is causing something of a stir north of 60.  Recent times have not been good for the college.  In early 2017, there was pressure from the Government to cut Social Work and Teacher Education programs (a decision later rescinded); soon afterwards the Government eliminated the college’s entire Board of Directors and replaced it with a single administrator before the review (one suspects there are a lot of stories here, but NWT

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Chinese Higher Education in Four Graphs

Every once in awhile you have to just sit and marvel at what the Chinese government has managed to pull off in higher education.  Since the turn of the millennium, enrolments have increased five-fold.  That’s staggering enough, but check out figure 1 below. Figure 1: Change in Enrolment and Size of 18-21 Cohort, 2000-2017 (2000 = 100) That five-fold jump in enrolment?  It occurred at the same time as a 21% drop in the size of the 18-21 cohort (in

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More York

[the_ad id=”12709″] Judging by most of my mail bag, yesterday’s piece on the York strike was a hit.  So, I thought I would throw in two tidbits which I didn’t really get to yesterday, as well as give my suggestion for a way out of the strike. Tidbit 1:  For those of you who don’t know the geography of York: it’s massive.  The main Keele campus is over 450 acres.  But, in a terrible for management/great for labour act of

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The York Strike

Back on March 5, CUPE local 3903, which represents graduate students, contract faculty and graduate assistants at York University, went on strike. A university offer was resoundingly rejected by the union membership in early April.  The union has consistently rejected arbitration. The Liberals dithered about back-to-work legislation until so late in the legislative session that it could easily be blocked by the NDP (which it was, as could easily have been foreseen given the NDP pledge never to use back-to-work legislation). 

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