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Category: Institutions

Non-profit Islands in a For-Profit Ocean

One of the most irritating, head-bangingly simplistic slogans in Canadian politics is “no to for-profit healthcare”.  It’s one thing to suggest that there should be no financial barriers to accessing healthcare; it’s another to suggest getting rid of “profit”.  I mean, the entire system is based on profit.  You think the companies who build hospitals and clinics don’t make profit?  That the companies that sell heath software or medical equipment, or you know, actual medicines, aren’t in it for profit?  That doctors

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June 6, 2016 1 Comment

Institutional Branding (2)

Yesterday I talked a bit about some basic rules of branding in universities, and why some of the wailing about the similarity of university brands are kind of overdone.  The key reason for this is because in fact most universities are competing in a very local market with only a few genuine competitors.  So yeah, maybe there are only a half-dozen genuinely unique brand-types out there, but as long as you have fewer than six direct competitors, that’s not necessarily

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June 3, 2016 2 Comments

Institutional Branding (Part 1)

Branding is one of those things that inspires strong views in higher education.  Some fret over the fact that university brands are too similar, others get indignant over the fact that branding is necessary at all, usually using some variation on the rhetorical argument “what are we, dishwashing soap?” Part of the problem, I think, stems from misunderstandings about what brands are and how universities use them.  Every university has a “brand” whether it wants one or not.  A brand

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June 2, 2016 3 Comments

Early Results from the Tennessee “Free Tuition” Experiment

You may remember a blog I wrote last year concerning something called the Tennessee Promise.  Described by some as a “free tuition” program, essentially what it did was ensure that every Tennessee student enrolled in a Tennessee community college received student aid at least equal to tuition.  In the fall, the state touted that first year, direct-from high-school enrollments in Tennessee colleges had increased by fourteen percent.  But now, however, some more complete data is available in the form of

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June 1, 2016 2 Comments

Three Unconnected Thoughts on PSE and Aboriginal Peoples

1)      Changing Disciplines In the last five years or so, I’ve seen a real change in the way Aboriginal students are moving through the country’s PSE system.  For a whole number of reasons, aboriginal students were traditionally concentrated either in humanities disciplines like history and sociology, or they were in disciplines which led to careers in social services or direct band employment (child care, police foundations, education, nursing).  STEM and Business fields simply weren’t in the picture.  That’s changed substantially over

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May 27, 2016 3 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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