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Category: Universities

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

Funding Polytechnics v. Funding Universities

Recently, a colleague asked me how big I thought the gap in funding was between polytechnics and universities.  My hunch was that universities were certainly better funded if you include all sources of income, but that if you just looked at core provincial government funding, the gap might not be so large.  So, for giggles, I decided to try to compare the two. Due to the complexity of various funding mechanisms and – especially – the difference in the nature

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February 7, 2018 1 Comment
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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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