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Category: Universities

Budget Denialism

You’ve heard of climate change denialism?  The use of spurious, crap data to try to undermine public acceptance of the well-established phenomenon of climate change?  Well, there’s something sweeping Canadian campuses that’s very similar.  I call it budget denialism.  Let me show you some examples from two universities in particular: Dalhousie and Wilfrid Laurier. The Dal budget is here.  The focus of complaints at Dalhousie has been the $5.6 million cut to “faculties”.  Now, when you hear the word “faculties”,

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March 25, 2015 5 Comments

Getting Mugged By Your Own Government

Good morning from Maputo, where word has reached me regarding a truly awful piece of government policy emanating from Regina. Page 14 of the provincial budget briefly suggests that something miraculous has occurred in provincial funding policy: This budget provides 1.0 per cent operating increases for universities, affiliated colleges and regional colleges and 2.0 per cent operating increases for technical institutes and federated colleges.  Overall, the 2015-16 Budget includes $661.2 million in post-secondary operating and targeted funding, a reduction of $8.17 million

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March 23, 2015 No Comments

The Alternative to the End of College (Part 3)

So, if Kevin Carey is pretty much dead on about the weaknesses of current universities, and mostly wrong about where things go from here, how else might universities change over the next couple of decades? Let’s start with the key points: Money pressures aren’t going to ease up.  The cost disease will always be with us; Professors want to research, and they don’t want to do it in soviet-style academies, divorced from teaching.  They’ll fight hard for present system; Higher education is,

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March 13, 2015 1 Comment

The End of College? (Part 2)

As discussed yesterday, Kevin Carey’s The End of College pinpoints higher education’s key ills in its inability (or unwillingness) to provide students with any real signal about the quality of their work.  This serves students badly in a number of ways.  First, it makes finding job matches harder, and second, it means institutions can mis-sell themselves by investing in the accoutrements of excellence (ivy, quads, expensive residences) without its substance. Essentially, Carey believes that technology will solve these problems.  He’s not a

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March 12, 2015 3 Comments

The End of College? (Part 1)

Over the next couple of days, I want to talk a bit about a new book called The End of College, written by the New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey.  It’s an important book not just because it’s been excerpted repeatedly in some major publications, or because the conclusions are correct (in my view: they’re not), but because it has an unerringly precise diagnosis of how higher education came to its present malaise, and the nature of the economic and institutional reasons that

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March 11, 2015 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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