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Category: Now Reading

Two Great Books on Admissions

An important shift during the last half-decade or so in US higher education is the serious consideration that increased selectivity at the top 5-10% of institutions may be doing real damage to the goal of social mobility.  It’s not just data nerds like Raj Chetty doing big data projects on outcomes: it’s becoming a topic of national conversation.  If you want to learn more about it in detail, you couldn’t do better than two new books: Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets in and

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September 17, 2020 No 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

The Winter/Spring 2020 Reading List

All right, it’s nearly summer and even if going to the beach seems like a forlorn hope this year, I know you are all desperate for my higher education book picks.  So, here goes. Among the 35 higher education books I have read so far this year, there are a lot to forget.  I bought a ton of higher education books from Palgrave in December when they were running a ludicrous 90% off sale, and…let’s just say that a lot

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June 17, 2020 No Comments

The Follies of Technological Determinism

One of the most enraging things about people doing drive-by takes on higher education is their insistence on focussing on the “implications of technology” rather than looking at consumer demand.  This month’s example comes to us from the Research Department of the Royal Bank of Canada and their piece entitled The Future of Post-Secondary Education: On Campus, Online and In Demand. The piece is a little uneven, in the sense that it mixes grand pronouncements about the future of higher education

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June 11, 2020 No Comments

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

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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