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Category: Institutions

Field of Study (oh the humanities!)

This is part II of a blog on new enrolment data. I’ll be focussing on the universities data today because the change there is more dynamic.  (I know, I know, college peeps: I don’t pay enough attention to you.  I’ll try to make this up to you next week). So let’s look at the division of undergraduate enrolment for a second.  Figure 1 shows the split between fields of science.  The Big Six are Social Science & Law (20%), Business/Commerce/Administration

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January 10, 2018 5 Comments

What’s in a name?

Every once in awhile I get asked: how come Canadians call the “universities” but Americans call them “colleges” and I had to confess that I really didn’t know beyond “it has something to do with the original American institutions being modelled on English universities and the Canadian ones on Scottish ones”.  But over Xmas, I did some reading and found the actual answer.  I think. Anyways, here’s my understanding: back in the 13th century, when the first two real European universities

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January 8, 2018 No Comments

A Canny Government Relations Strategy

[the_ad id=”11720″] Though it didn’t get a whole lot of ink/pixels, the Council of Ontario Universities launched a new lobbying campaign last week.  It’s called Partnering for a Better Future for Ontario and its focal point is a document of the same name – you can read the short version of the report here (yes, I know, only in academia could the short version of a lobbying report be 44 pages long).  In fact, it’s accompanied by a wide variety of supporting documents which

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December 7, 2017 No Comments

The Cost of an Aging Professoriate

You may have read recently about how Canada is really sticking it to junior researchers.  Dalhousie’s Julia Wright recently wrote about Canada haemorrhaging early-career research capacity and she has a point – just in the last seven years, the proportion of Canadian faculty aged 40 or less has fallen by a third, from roughly 22% to just over 15%. The question, of course, is “why”?  Some – including Wright – just blame a “shrinking academic labour market”, which tends to (either by

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December 6, 2017 7 Comments

Last Orders on Neoliberalism in Universities (Neoliberalism Part 5)

To sum up the week’s arguments: Neoliberalism is about markets.  There are actually very few genuine markets in higher education and where there are they can be quite beneficial especially with respect to access. Neoliberalism is about competition.  There is competition in higher education, especially status competition but it mostly predates actual neoliberalism. Some people claim neoliberalism is about managerialism and performance metrics but this is a genuinely terrible and ahistorical argument. However, I think there are two additional arguments

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November 24, 2017 No 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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