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Category: Institutions

The Great STEM-Arts Reversal

It’s always good, once in awhile, to check up on application statistics, just to check up on demand for education.  Ontario, thank God, has a system that allows you to look at applications system-wide.  A few years ago, everyone was panicking about falling application numbers because of a five percent fall in 2013-2015, mostly caused by a significant fall in the number of 18 year-olds. So how have things been since then?  Well, it turns out that application numbers have stabilized.  In

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March 14, 2018 2 Comments

A Suspect Report About Precarity

About a month ago, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put out a report on precarious employment in Ontario universities and colleges. One good thing about this document at the outset: it has an imaginative research design.  There is so much we do not know, and in the absence of any detailed reporting by institutions themselves cannot know about employment in post-secondary institutions.  To get around this, the report’s authors, Erika Shaker and Robin Shaban, gather data from the Labour Force Survey,

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March 12, 2018 1 Comment

For Lifelong Learning, Time to Go Big

I have been thinking a lot lately about the need for greater adaptation to lifelong learning.  I am, as you all know, generally pretty skeptical of any “Fourth-Industrial-Revolution-sky-is-falling-right-this-instant” rationales for institutional change, but that’s not a reason not to think about big change.  First, because even in the absence of radical labour market change there are ways we can do a lot better at lifelong learning than we currently do, and second because given the length of time it takes

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February 26, 2018 1 Comment

Less Nonsense about Technological Change, Please

University leaders have to put up with a lot of crap from politicians and business people.  There’s a lot of genuflecting to whatever the fads and feelings of the day are, just so they can appear “relevant” and “in tune”.  Superclusters? Oh yeah, superclusters are a great idea, Minister, really terrific, why has no one thought of them before?  When you are after public money, saying soothing things about the delusions of the powerful is just part of the game.

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February 9, 2018 2 Comments

Funding Polytechnics v. Funding Universities

Recently, a colleague asked me how big I thought the gap in funding was between polytechnics and universities.  My hunch was that universities were certainly better funded if you include all sources of income, but that if you just looked at core provincial government funding, the gap might not be so large.  So, for giggles, I decided to try to compare the two. Due to the complexity of various funding mechanisms and – especially – the difference in the nature

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February 7, 2018 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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