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Category: Universities

What Really Happened During COVID? Part 2

Yesterday, we examined student income during COVID.  On aggregate, income might not have dropped at all once the Canada Education Student Benefit is taken into the equation, though there was probably some re-distribution of money away from students who work summers to those who don’t.  Today, I want to look at what happened to institutions in the pandemic, because again the picture painted by the data emerging from institutional financial statements is quite different from the conventional wisdom about what

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October 6, 2021 2 Comments

Campuses and Univer-Cities

For the last couple of weeks, I have been plowing through three books on universities and their built environments: Paul Venable Turner’s classic tome Campus: An American Planning Tradition, two recent works on universities and cities: Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century by LaDale C. Winling, and In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities by Davarian L. Baldwin, both dealing primarily with urban universities in the United States (though the latter has some

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May 27, 2021 1 Comment

What You Have to Believe to Believe the Cromwell Report

You will likely recall the Azarova affair at the University of Toronto, which I first wrote about back here. It has now risen to international prominence because of Masha Gessen’s piece in the New Yorker, the Canadian Association of University Teacher’s (CAUT) censure motion and an increasingly successful boycott U of T campaign.  To summarize: early last August U of T’s law faculty, while hiring a new Executive Director for its International Human Rights Program, began employment negotiations with Dr. Valentina Azarova. She is a)

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May 25, 2021 1 Comment

Short Courses and Continuing Education

A few weeks ago, Statistics Canada released a paper profiling graduates of community colleges who already held bachelor’s degrees.  A significant number of these were graduates of foreign universities – immigrants who came to the country with a degree and then found they needed a Canadian credential.  But there were also a substantial number – fully 8% of all college graduates – who already had a degree from a Canadian university.  In the 1990s, when colleges first started pointing out this

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May 11, 2021 1 Comment

Laurentian Blues (8) Causes, Fault, and Lessons

Good morning.  I had hoped to get you a bit more detail about what has happened at Laurentian in the last few days, but as usual there is less info available than there should be.  Here’s what we know: Late Monday, the university released a list of 69 programs that have been discontinued.  Most of them are programs which have fewer than 30 students (in some cases considerably fewer), and a lot of these programs are in humanities, which is not

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April 15, 2021 15 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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