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Category: Universities

Designing a University from Scratch (II)

Following on from yesterday’s discussion of the Minerva model (you might want to refresh your memory by re-reading yesterday’s entry, as detailed in the book Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education, I wanted to get into a bit more detail about whether the Minerva curriculum is a foretaste of things to come, a weird one-off, or an evolutionary dead-end. Short answer: I certainly hope Minerva represents a new trend in curricula, but I see one big

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April 5, 2018 No Comments

Designing a University from Scratch (I)

I’ve recently been reading a fascinating book entitled Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education which essentially is an operating manual for the Minerva Schools (if you have never heard of, or have forgotten Minerva, I did a write-up of it back in 2013). What everyone remembers about Minerva is the sizzle – students move across seven cities in four years (San Francisco for a year, followed by one term in each of Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Taipei and London) and all

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April 4, 2018 1 Comment

The STEM-Arts Reversal, Part III

So, on Monday, I showed how Ontario universities are changing their enrolment patterns in response to changing demand and what we saw was that over the period 2009-2016, enrolments in Arts stayed flat while enrolments in STEM rose by nearly 40%. But the question is: how have staff complements changed in order to deal with this?  To answer this, I tried to look at changes in staff complements at the same nine universities.  Unfortunately, Brock does not provide data on

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March 21, 2018 4 Comments

The STEM-Arts Reversal Part II

Last week I did a blog about changes in applications to Ontario universities by field of study which included this graph, which seems to have freaked a lot of people out. Figure 1: Applications to Ontario Universities by Field of Study, 2005-2018 But this is just an indication of student preferences.  So I wondered to myself: have Ontario’s universities actually adapted to this shift and changing their admissions and enrolment patterns, or do we have a lot of frustrated wannabe-

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March 19, 2018 No Comments

The Great STEM-Arts Reversal

It’s always good, once in awhile, to check up on application statistics, just to check up on demand for education.  Ontario, thank God, has a system that allows you to look at applications system-wide.  A few years ago, everyone was panicking about falling application numbers because of a five percent fall in 2013-2015, mostly caused by a significant fall in the number of 18 year-olds. So how have things been since then?  Well, it turns out that application numbers have stabilized.  In

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March 14, 2018 2 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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