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Category: Universities

A Response to Critics

So, we’ve been hearing a number of criticisms – both directly and via the grapevine – of the research rankings we released last week. (Warning: if you’re not entranced by bibliometric methodology, you can safely skip today’s post). The main point at issue is that at some schools, our staff counts appear to be on the high side. Based on this, some schools have inferred that we are judging them too harshly – that if we had fewer observations, the denominator would

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September 6, 2012 No Comments

Research Rankings

Today, we at HESA are releasing our brand new Canadian Research Rankings. We’re pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished here, so let me tell you a bit about them. Unlike previous Canadian research rankings conducted by Research InfoSource, these aren’t simply about raw money and publication totals. As we’ve already seen, those measures tend to privilege strength in some disciplines (the high-citation, high-cost ones) more than others. Institutions which are good in low-citation, low-cost disciplines simply never get recognized in these schemes.

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August 29, 2012 1 Comment

Research Grants by Discipline

So, tomorrow, HESA will be releasing its inaugural set of Canadian research rankings. We think they’re pretty cool; not only are they the first attempt in Canada to employ field-normalization techniques on bibliometric data, as far as we’re aware, they’re the first rankings anywhere in the world to employ field-normalization on research income. Why does this matter? Well, not all research was created alike. Each discipline has a different publication culture, for starters. The average H-index score for an academic

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August 28, 2012 No Comments

The Road to Three

Glenn Murray is a man in a hurry. He talks – it’s never clear how seriously – about shortening degrees to three years within the lifetime of this government. Let’s be generous and grant that the McGuinty government will actually last a full four years – what are the odds of getting to achieving this? Honestly? Zero. Zip. Bupkis. Here’s why: There are only two feasible routes to three-year degrees – the compression model and the re-design model. The former is

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August 24, 2012 1 Comment

Re-designing to Three

So, we’ve covered the ideas of cutting graduation requirements, bringing back grade 12, and degree compression as ways to get to a three-year degree. That leaves course re-design. There are some examples out there of full-on re-design of programs from four years of seat time to three years of competencies. The best known is probably at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), which was the subject of a recent book called Saving Higher Education: The Integrated, Competency-Based Three-Year Bachelor Degree Program. The

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August 23, 2012 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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