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Category: Universities

The Impact of Impact

Over the past 24-36 months, we’ve seen a real shift towards talking about universities in terms of community benefit/impact rather than in terms of their scientific output.  No more valorization based on silly bibliometrics!  Valorization rather on….well, what exactly? The thing about the whole publish-or-perish thing is that it had created some reasonably fair and equitable standards.  These standards varied from place-to-place, and in some places, they went overboard in being overly-rigid on pure publication metrics, but basically people were

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November 23, 2021 3 Comments

UBC Expanding

A couple of weeks ago, the University of British Columbia issued a press release, which read: The University of British Columbia is expanding its presence south of the Fraser River with the $70-million purchase of a property in Surrey. Whoo!  Big bucks!  Can’t go wrong buying property in the Lower Mainland, right?  Seems like this could just be a good long-term financial play. I mean, why tie up your investments entirely in equities when property is so hot?          UBC

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November 22, 2021 7 Comments

Lock-in

One of the most interesting topics in economic geography is “lock-in”:  that is, the tendency of a region to double-down on a particular set of industries/technologies.   Generally, the term is used in a negative fashion: that is, the doubling-down is done unwisely, when said industries and technologies are becoming uncompetitive and/or heading for obsolescence.  It’s easy enough to understand why regions do this: if they have specialized in a particular area, it’s because at one point they had a big

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November 16, 2021 2 Comments

Bring Back the Transparency Debate

In 1991, Maclean’s began publishing university rankings.  In doing so, it relied heavily on university co-operation: in particular, it required institutions to fill in a survey for various pieces of data on admissions, class sizes, etc.  Not all the questions were particularly well-defined and so there was a lot of data gaming.  Eventually, in 2006, the universities decided they were not going to play the game any more: they were going to get out of the rankings business and instead set up

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November 15, 2021 1 Comment

The University of Austin

So, some of you may have seen the kerfuffle about the creation of a new university “dedicated to the truth” (see the NYT article here).  This initiative, unconventionally announced to the world via a Medium blogpost, is to be led by the former President of St. John’s College (Annapolis) Pano Kanelos, but he has accumulated a very large number of backers, both in terms of finances and “people who matter”.  This latter group includes a wide variety of people, some of

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November 11, 2021 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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