Hi all. Hope you all had a restful set of holidays. At the start of a new decade, it is fashionable to look ahead at what will happen in one’s sector. Personally, I think that life is going to change in ways we can’t imagine over the next ten years, so getting too specific is a fool’s errand. What I would like to do instead is talk about what the big challenges are going to be. The first big challenge
Remember about a month ago when I noted how several Ontario colleges now had international student numbers above 50% of total enrolment? And about how in some cases this was being done by small town colleges establishing “partnerships” with private vocational colleges in the Greater Toronto Area? How they were effectively warehousing international students at these locations, charging them full tuition, and paying the private college to teach some allegedly bespoke curriculum while pocketing the difference? Two pieces of news.
If you are just joining us, we’re in the middle of a three-day session on the finances of the world’s top-200 universities, or, more specifically, the 147 of them in the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan and Canada. Yesterday, I showed that the top-200 institutions in all these countries were increasing their total expenditures in real terms, albeit at different rates, and that their research funding was also increasing substantially (in fact, faster than general revenues
Faithful readers may remember my blog last year about Cape Breton University and how it doubled its international enrolment in one year, making an absolutely ludicrous amount of money in the process. As a result of this phenomenal little piece of entrepreneurialism, Cape Breton has suddenly become hip in higher education circles, because the whole idea of anyone flooding into Sydney, Nova Scotia, let alone young people from halfway around the globe, is pretty astonishing to Sydneysiders as much as anyone else. Whatever they’re
I spent part of this week at College of the North Atlantic – Qatar in Doha. Having had the pleasure of visiting in 2008, it was fascinating to see the evolution of the organization, particularly now that the institution is starting to pass from Canadian to Qatari control. One of the things we talked about quite a bit in the various sessions I attended and/or ran was the issue of delivering a Canadian curriculum to students whose secondary education was
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.
