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Category: Institutions

Under-managed universities

I have been having some interesting conversations with folks recently about “overwork” in academia.  It is clear to me that a lot of professors are absolutely frazzled.  It is also clear to me that on average professors work hard – not necessarily because The Man is standing over them with a whip but because as a rule academics are professional and driven, and hey, status within academia is competitive and lots of people want to keep up with the Joneses.

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March 1, 2017 9 Comments

Four Mega-Trends in International Higher Education – Catch-up is Hard

One of the perpetual alleged threats to cross-border education is that universities in the developing world might someday rival those in the west. Once that happens, the theory goes, students won’t need to go abroad and the whole international student thing goes up in smoke. It’s not an implausible theory, but it underplays how difficult catching up actually is. The most basic problem for universities in developing countries is paying staff. Those talented and fortunate enough to have a terminal

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February 24, 2017 No Comments

How to Fund (3)

You all may remember that in early 2015, the province of Ontario announced it was going to review its university funding formula.  There was no particular urgency to do so, and many were puzzled as to “why now”?  The answer, we were told, was that the Liberal government thought it could make improvements in the system by changing the funding structure.  Specifically, they said in their consultation document that they thought they could use a new formula to improve i) improve

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February 16, 2017 No Comments

Loving It

Back in the summer you may have heard a bit of a brouhaha about a deal signed between Colleges Ontario and McDonald’s, allowing McDonald’s management trainees to receive advanced standing in business programs at Ontario colleges.  If you read the papers, what you probably saw was a he-said/she-said story in which someone from Colleges Ontario said something like “Ontario colleges are providing advanced credit for people who have been through a MacDonald’s management training program and that’s a good thing

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February 1, 2017 No Comments

Hiring Decisions

One of the more thoughtful replies I received to my piece on CAUT’s politicization of university accounting pointed out that one of the reasons people didn’t trust university accounting was because they made seemingly incomprehensible decisions with respect to hiring.  How was it, my reader asked, that there was plenty of money to hire sessionals but never money to hire full-time, permanent faculty?  Isn’t that money fungible?  Why spend on one and not the other? I can see why this might

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January 31, 2017 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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