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Category: Research

How Not to Write About a Pandemic

So, I think I have found what is definitively the worst possible take on COVID-19 and universities.  It is called: “The Academy’s Neoliberal Response to COVID-19: Why We Should Be Wary and Why We Should Push Back”, by St. Jerome’s University’s Honor Brabazon and it was published by Academic Matters, the house organ of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (a shorter version also was published by CAUT). Do read it because it’s a classic of academic narcissism: 100%

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June 8, 2020 9 Comments

Work in 2030

All models are wrong, but some models are useful.  This phrase, usually attributed to the statistician George Box, is especially apt when it comes to labour market forecasts.  There is an obsession among policymakers about “getting better data” and “getting good labour market projections,” which can in turn (to some extent) drive planning for skills training and post-secondary education.  And it is definitely a phrase that comes to mind when describing the new, bold labour market projection system described in

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June 3, 2020 No Comments

Coronavirus (13) – Virus Federalism

Though the national media has dealt gingerly with the subject, the fact is that this pandemic is playing out very differently across the country.  Ontario and Quebec are still in full-on holy crap mode: the situation is bad, no two ways about it.  Not Italy bad, but bad enough.  But away from Central Canada, it’s a very different story, as this graph from Tuesday’s Globe and Mail shows. Look at BC, where despite proximity to the early outbreak hub of Seattle, new daily cases

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April 8, 2020 No Comments

Problems in International Institutional Typology

As you all know, a reasonable chunk of my work involves making international comparisons.  This is far from simple in higher education because basic units of analysis differ enormously from one country to another.  Whether you are counting students (do doctoral students count, when in some countries they are classified as employees? How do you equivalize student numbers for part-time status, which exists only in some countries?), or staff (how do you equivalize by rank? Do teaching-only staff count? What

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March 26, 2020 1 Comment

(University) Life During Wartime

Since everyone is using war metaphors to describe current efforts against COVID-19, I thought it might be worth taking a trip down memory lane to look at what universities did during the World Wars (colleges, being mostly creatures of the 50s-70s, were not around then, so this is a single-sector survey).  I am not convinced it’s the right metaphor – in Britain, for example, their death-cult instinct makes them treat every crisis like it’s 1940. Because of their refusal to

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March 23, 2020 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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