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Category: Universities

Those Big, Bad, “American-style” Program Reviews

Hi everyone, and welcome back. The best education story of the winter break was almost certainly the Globe piece on program reviews at Canadian universities.  Despite an inane headline (when it comes to a policy’s unsuitability, nothing unites Canadian bien-pensants more than claims to an American origin), it’s an important piece about a useful process occurring at universities across Canada. HESA has directly contributed to two of these exercises (you can see some of our work, here), and with that experience I think

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January 7, 2013 No Comments

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

I haven’t written about MOOCs in awhile, mostly because I’m finding the whole discussion pretty tedious.  They’re an interesting addition to the spectrum of continuing education offerings, and they’ll exist so long as venture capitalists and large, big-brand universities feel like subsidizing the hell out of them. Period. The supposed “value” of MOOCs is that they deliver the same old lecture-driven process at a cheaper price.  But what should be our real priority right now: Making education cheaper, or finding

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December 21, 2012 1 Comment

More Thoughts on Presidential Selections

A couple of points which I couldn’t quite jam into last week’s blog on University Presidents: 1) Where are the foreigners?   Why do we assume that only Canadians can run Canadian universities?  It’s fairly obvious from their actions that university Boards of Governors assume this.  And when we do want a “foreign” perspective, all we seem to do is repatriate Canadians (e.g.: Robert Birgenau at Toronto, Roseann Runte at Carleton, Doyle Anderson at FNU, etc.). That’s a pretty poor showing

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December 20, 2012 2 Comments

Lessons from Quebec

What lessons can we learn from the current mess in Quebec?  I think two stand out – one for students, and one for universities. The lesson for students is this: it’s great that they can mobilize and maintain pressure on government in the ways they have over the past twelve months.  But, if you fight a tuition fee hike by telling government that there’s oodles of waste and inefficiency in universities, don’t be surprised if they take you at your

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December 19, 2012 No Comments

Baumol vs. Bowen

A fascinating paper came out recently on SSRN, which should be of interest to anyone concerned with the economics of higher education.  Its purpose was to answer a most interesting question: is cost-inflation in higher education driven by internal factors, or external ones? There are two leading theories about cost-inflation in higher education.  The first, proposed by William Baumol (whose new book I mentioned last week), argues that external factors are to blame.  Education, as a labour-intensive good, says Baumol, will always see

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December 18, 2012 No 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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