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Category: Universities

A Miracle in Melbourne

Today, I want to tell you about one of the most amazing stories in recent higher education history.  It happened at the University of Melbourne about eight years ago, and it involved having the country’s leading university completely up-end its entire curriculum – every single degree program – in the space of about 24 months.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: the Melbourne Model. The basic story is this: A decade ago, Melbourne – like all Australian universities – had a

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October 10, 2014 1 Comment

How to Prepare for a Punch in the Mouth

Universities and colleges love their strategic plans.  Plans beget task lists.  Task lists beget work agendas.  Work agendas beget Targets.  Targets beget Annual Evaluations.  And all of it provides a serene sense of control: a belief that we can control the future simply by planning our future work flows. The thing is, it’s mostly nonsense. To see why, consider Dwight D. Eisenhower, who famously said “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless.  But planning is

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October 9, 2014 4 Comments

Too Big to Fail?

Here’s a serious question: are universities too big to fail?  And if so, what are the consequences of that? If we had a fully public system, with tight government oversight on budgets, and no deficit spending – sort of like what much of continental Europe has – this wouldn’t be an issue.  By definition, public institutions couldn’t fail (though presumably a government would be free to close an institution should it wish to do so).   But the existence of institutional

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October 2, 2014 1 Comment

Differentiation and Branding From the Student Perspective

One question that always comes up (or should come up, anyway) in discussions of university branding and positioning is: “how different is our institution, really”?  Well, for a few years, when we ran the Globe and Mail Canadian University Report survey, we used to ask students questions that would allow us to see how different students thought their university was.  The results were… interesting. We asked students to locate their institution on an 11-point double-ended scale.  Did they think their institution was

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September 29, 2014 5 Comments

Systematically Valuing the Wrong Things

Michael Staton is a former teacher, venture capitalist, and founder of Uversity, which is a kind of data nerd Strategic Enrolment Management outfit in the US.  He also has some interesting ideas about the “unbundling” of higher education, which have appeared – amongst other places – in Andrew Kelly and Kevin Carey’s recent book Stretching the Higher Education Dollar (ungated copy available here). His take is that there are four basic groups of services that undergraduate education strives to deliver, and that in at

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September 18, 2014 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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