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Category: Universities

Strategy Horizons at the Top

I’ve been working on a project recently, looking at current university strategic plans around the world, and particularly those of leading “world-class” universities. One of the key things I am looking at is what you might call “strategic horizons”— how long do institutions see or plan ahead? My sample for this is the Top 100 universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), done by the Shanghai Rankings organization (minus the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, which is

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May 26, 2025 1 Comment

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (May 16, 2025)

Spotlight Happy Friday to all readers,  This AI blog will be the last of the current academic semester, before we take a bit of a break until the next academic year. It will also be a bit of a longer one, to properly wrap the year… So sit comfortably and enjoy the ride! Last month, we hosted a virtual AI Roundtable to reflect on learnings from AI-CADEMY, discuss remaining challenges, and try to identify concrete steps for institutions to consider

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May 16, 2025 No Comments

Two Ideas Long Overdue for Adoption

Two mini thoughts today rather than one long one. But they are both ideas which I think deserve to be taken more seriously than they currently are. Mergers that Make Sense You may recall that a few months ago, I skewered the idea that institutional mergers were a useful path to take for the purpose of cutting costs. But the more I have been thinking about it, there may be a pretty good case—at least in a few places—of mergers for

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May 14, 2025 3 Comments

Probably not the next Laurentian, but…..

As I noted yesterday, there are only two institutions in Canada which have run deficits in each of the last five years: St. Thomas University (STU) and Vancouver Island University (VIU). In both instances, these institutions have had deficits averaging between 4 and 5% of their total income over the course of those five years. By any definition, this puts them on some kind of watch list. As Figures 1 and 2 show, the root cause of both institutions’ problems

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May 7, 2025 2 Comments

Post-COVID University Surpluses (Deficits)

Ok, everyone, buckle up. For I have been looking at university financial statements for 2023-24 and the previous few years, and I have Some Thoughts. In this exercise, I examined the financial statements from 2017-18 onwards for the 66 Canadian universities which are not federated with a larger institution and had income over $20 million. L’Université du Québec was excluded from the analysis below because it has yet to release financial statements for 2023-24. Figure 1 shows the average net

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May 6, 2025 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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