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Category: Research

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 4)

When it comes to higher education, one of the most salient facts about Canada is that we are a federation in which both levels of governments play important roles.  Yet, to put it mildly, we are not very good at co-ordinating those roles.  Indeed, some might say we are uniquely bad at it.  If we were serious about higher education, we wouldn’t be. The main problem has to do with Science and how it is funded. The bulk of our scientific

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April 11, 2019 No Comments

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 2)

If you missed yesterday’s blog, we’re spending the week talking about how to improve higher education in Canada by acting less complacently.  Now you’re up to speed. Onwards! Let’s start our discussion of higher education improvement at the top of the food chain: provincial governments (if, for some reason, you think the top of the food chain is the federal government, feel free to spend some time perusing the blog archives). Governments fund universities and colleges.  Apart from Ontario, they

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April 9, 2019 3 Comments

Excellence vs Progress

Earlier this week, I was in Moscow at a session talking about (among other things) national excellence programs, making the point that there aren’t really that many examples of successful ones.  One of the university rectors in the audience then asked me the following question (I apologize for paraphrasing a bit here because I don’t remember the exact wording): “look, the real problem in science is that we are spinning our wheels, not making any great discoveries.  Instead, all we

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March 21, 2019 No Comments

Organizing Science

I’m on my way to Moscow today.  It’s become one of my favourite destinations not only because I can walk around and pretend I am in my favourite novels (I highly recommend an early morning stroll to the Patriarch Ponds and then sit on one of the benches to read the opening chapter of The Master and Margarita) but also because Russia in general holds a mirror up to the west and makes you question the “normal” order of things. 

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March 18, 2019 1 Comment

Excellence Initiatives

Over the past couple of decades, countries have designed policies to improve their research universities and make them more “world-class”, largely on the assumption that this will pay some kind of economic dividend.  A lot of these policies involved what became known as “excellence initiatives” – projects that concentrated spending on a restricted number of institutions with the idea that these extra resources would propel these universities into some kind of global elite.  This raises the question: do they work?

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March 11, 2019 2 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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