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Category: Students

Managing Class Sizes (Part 1)

One of the things that many people misunderstand about higher education is the way the economics of classrooms actually work; in particular about the relationship between enrolments, teaching complements, teaching loads, and class sizes. Today and tomorrow, I want to tease these out a bit. For this post, let’s take a faculty with 100 professors, which admits 500 students per year and has 10% attrition per year, which translates to 1720 students total. That means it has a student-professor ratio

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September 18, 2019 1 Comment

Know Your Incoming Students (2019 edition)

It’s the start of the school year and that’s the best time to examine trends among incoming students. Fortunately for us, this is one of those subjects where Canada has decent public data on the subject, as the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC) has been asking a (mostly) consistent set of questions to first-year students on a triennial basis since 2001. It’s not a perfect survey: consortium membership changes from cycle to cycle, so the base population is neither equal

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August 28, 2019 No Comments

Hit Pause

All right, everyone.  It’s the solstice today, and that’s pretty much the signal for everyone to press the pause button and wind things down for the summer.  This blog is no exception.  I’ll be back on August 26th, unlikely to be rested (packed schedule for the summer already), but hopefully recharged and for another year of data analysis, global updates and snark in roughly equal proportion (the way you all like it, right?) When I do these end-of-term things, I

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June 21, 2019 2 Comments

Student Affairs

I spent a couple of days out in Calgary this week at the annual meeting of Canadian Association of University & College Student Services (CACUSS).  I had not been to one of these in quite awhile – long enough ago that the meetings could be held on a campus and not in a convention centre – and I was intrigued at some of the changes that seem to have taken place in these occupations, which I suspect reflect some significant

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June 20, 2019 No Comments

Danger Ahead

Canadian universities and colleges like to congratulate themselves for their enormous success in increasing international student enrolments over the past few years.  And why not?  That success has brought Canadian institutions billions of dollars and allowed them to make up for roughly a decade of domestic tuition fee controls and stagnant core provincial funding. We have told ourselves a lot of stories over the last few years about why we have been so successful.  Many of them have to do

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June 10, 2019 1 Comment
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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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