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Category: Worldwide PSE

The Real Competition is Closer Than You Think

I’ve recently been dismissive of the notion that Canada is “falling behind” in higher education since everyone seems to insist on making ludicrous comparisons with places like China, Switzerland and Singapore.  But upon a little bit of further digging, it turns out there is one of our very close competitors which is doing rather well these days, one we probably should be worried about despite the fact that we’ve mostly been ignoring it since the Financial Crisis of ’08. It’s our

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October 3, 2017 2 Comments

China, Switzerland, Singapore

The other day, I questioned a claim made by University of Toronto President Meric Gerlter that we were falling behind countries like “China, Switzerland and Singapore” having made major recent investments in science and higher education.  First of all, I noted, this was an odd trio, with nothing much to suggest it was true other than the rise of a few institutions in such countries as doing reasonably well in various university rankings.  Second, I noted that the claim that

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September 28, 2017 No Comments

Some Surprising (?) Data on Canadian University Expenditures

I’ve been doing some work on financial data of higher education institutions around the world, and specifically looking at what’s been going on at top research institutions compared to everyone else.  And I thought maybe you all would be interested in what I’ve found for Canada. For the purpose of this document, I have separated the six institutions in Canada which always come top in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka “Shanghai Rankings”) – that’s Toronto, UBC, McGill, McMaster,

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September 27, 2017 1 Comment

Flagship Universities vs World-Class Universities

Almost since the “world-class” university paradigm was established fifteen years ago, the concept has faced a backlash.  The concept was too focussed on research production, it was unidimensional, it took no account of universities’ other missions, etc. etc.  Basically the argument was that if people took the world class university concept seriously, we would have a university monoculture that ignored many important facets of higher education. The latest iteration of this backlash comes in the form of the idea of

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September 21, 2017 2 Comments

Notes on the Finances of China’s Top Universities

One of my distractions over the past summer has been to learn more about Chinese universities.  And, fortunately, this is becoming a lot easier as Chinese universities are starting to put more of their data online.  Today, I just want to take you through a bit of a tour of China’s top universities (roughly the equivalent of the US Ivy League), which are known as the “C9”, most of which now put their financial data online. So let’s start just

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September 14, 2017 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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