Why are Canadian universities so scared of acting differently from one another?  Why does no one want a niche? I’m not just talking about their cookie-cutter mission statements here, which seem to involve adding the words “research” and “excellence” to the output of a random word generator. I’m talking about the cookie-cutter ways they go about their daily business. In marketing-speak: they have little or no brand personality.

It’s not as though cool niche missions are that hard to dream up. Here’s two:

The “Best Jobs” University.  Giving employment guarantees and talking up graduate employment rates are so 90s; with a shrinking labour force, the issue isn’t going to be whether graduates get jobs, it’s what kind of jobs they will get. So why shouldn’t some university take it on as a mission to ensure that its graduates get the best jobs?

Think about it: if that were your mission, your professors would be bound to spend a lot more time talking to employers not just about “what they want,” but really working with them on a day-to-day basis to understand what skills students need to be more effective in the workplace. It would mean spending lots of money on placement officers and on career services. And it would mean a serious commitment to tracking and measuring how students do, and taking their feedback about what helped them and what didn’t to heart. It wouldn’t be easy, but at the end of the day, you’d be able to tell a real, quantifiable story about how your graduates succeed.

The Character University. One’s university experience is to a very large degree conditioned by one’s classmates. That’s why selective U.S. universities subject prospective students to a rigorous interview process; to make sure they are getting not just good students, but the “right” ones. Canadian universities instead choose to make their admissions decisions based entirely on grades, in part because they feel it’s an easy place to cut costs.

Two words: false economy.

So why not reverse the process and put character at the heart of an admissions process? It’s quite possible: the Loran Awards do it year after year and they manage to pick one future Rhodes Scholar each year in the process. Sure, it would mean spending more on admissions, but involving alumni as American schools do would keep costs down. And the benefits are enormous: your students would be a lot more interesting and rewarding to teach (filtering out the whiners and grade-grubbers would be central to the process), and moral fibre would be your selling point.

These ideas aren’t cost- or difficulty-free, of course. But they’d pay for themselves pretty quickly by attracting better students, producing happier alumni and raising public profile.

Any takers?