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Category: Institutions

Designing a University from Scratch (I)

I’ve recently been reading a fascinating book entitled Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education which essentially is an operating manual for the Minerva Schools (if you have never heard of, or have forgotten Minerva, I did a write-up of it back in 2013). What everyone remembers about Minerva is the sizzle – students move across seven cities in four years (San Francisco for a year, followed by one term in each of Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Taipei and London) and all

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April 4, 2018 1 Comment

Enrolment Trends in Rural/Remote Community Colleges

For giggles, every once in awhile I start looking at institutional enrolment data.  This weekend, I started looking specifically at community colleges.  I noted back here that enrolment in colleges nationally has been pretty flat for the last five years, but that’s a national picture only.  Start drilling down to the level of individual institutions, and things start getting pretty interesting. For the most part, it’s not hard to find data on individual college enrolments over time, even without paying extortionate fees

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April 3, 2018 3 Comments

Humans Wanted

On Monday, the Royal Bank put out an interesting…well, what was it?  Research Paper?  Discussion Paper?  Idea-concept thingy?…called Humans Wanted: How Canadian Youth Can Thrive in the Age of Disruption.  It’s a bit of a mixed bag as a paper, but ultimately it’s not a bad start to the RBC’s “FutureLaunch” project on youth and skills. The core of the paper is an examination of jobs and skills in the new economy, their vulnerability to automation and their growth potential using

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March 28, 2018 1 Comment

A Challenge and An Opportunity in College Education

Earlier this week the Manitoba Government released a report that I and my colleague Yves Pelletier worked on for most of last year, the Manitoba College Review (you can read the report here). It was a challenging assignment, but I am very grateful to the many people to everyone who spent time with us and contributed to the report, and to all the alumni who answered our survey.  In terms of system governance, we made some fairly sweeping recommendations, ones that give government

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March 22, 2018 4 Comments

The STEM-Arts Reversal, Part III

So, on Monday, I showed how Ontario universities are changing their enrolment patterns in response to changing demand and what we saw was that over the period 2009-2016, enrolments in Arts stayed flat while enrolments in STEM rose by nearly 40%. But the question is: how have staff complements changed in order to deal with this?  To answer this, I tried to look at changes in staff complements at the same nine universities.  Unfortunately, Brock does not provide data on

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March 21, 2018 4 Comments

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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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