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Category: Media

Jumping to Conclusions on Rankings

You may have seen stories in Inside Higher Ed and University World News about the QS World Rankings, and specifically, a claim by a Senior Researcher at Berkeley named Igor Chirikov that QS’s conflicts of interest “may produce significant distortions in global university rankings”.  Cue much clucking on the interwebs about issues with rankings. All I can say, having read the paper, and having some idea of what QS does, is that the word “may” is doing a fair bit of work in that

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May 12, 2021 3 Comments

U of T, Soft Landings, and the Nuclear Option

I know you’ve all been very busy, so you may not have kept up with the to and fro of the University of Toronto’s law school lately.  Let me fill you in. A little over a month ago, the Globe and Mail revealed (over a number of articles, most notably these two: here and here) that the University of Toronto law school had run into some trouble in filling the job of Director of its International Human Rights Law program.  Over the summer,

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October 20, 2020 5 Comments

The Good, the Bad, and the Meh

Among the many articles related to education which have appeared over the past few weeks are three which I think deserve highlighting:  Mike Moffat & John McNally’s very good Making a Green Recovery Inclusive for All Canadians, Irvin Studin’s unfathomably terrible Canada Needs a Temporary Minister of Education and the needs-some-work “Leveraging the value of Canadian universities is key to our economic rebuild” by John Stackhouse and Andrew Schrumm. Let’s start with the Moffatt/McNally piece, which in truth is only tangentially related to post-secondary education.

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September 15, 2020 No Comments

Oh Hey, Tuition Data!

Every year in Canada, we have a back-to-school ritual: some time during the first week of the postsecondary term (usually on the Wednesday or Thursday), Statistics Canada releases its annual tuition fee survey. Pretty much everybody and their third cousin come together in our local, regional, and national newspapers to talk about how terrible it is that postsecondary education in this country “costs so much”. Like clockwork, articles appear, arguments are recycled, and there is much bewailing. Except this year.

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September 10, 2019 No Comments

Bad Coverage

A clutch of recent media stories about higher education are kind of irritating me.  Specifically, it’s the media credulity on display which is so disheartening. One major source of irritation has to do with stories which get written when a professor is suspended or dismissed. We’ve had two of these recently, one in Nova Scotia and one in BC. The one in Nova Scotia concerned Psychology professor (what the hell is it with Canadian psychology profs, anyway?)  Rick Mehta, who

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October 4, 2018 No Comments

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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