Welcome back to our daily edition of One Thought to Start Your Day.  I hope you all had a relaxing summer, because this year is shaping up to be one of the most interesting in the entire history of higher education.  It’s going to be exhausting.

As always, America – the home of mass higher education – will be setting the pace.  President Obama’s higher education reform proposals are so ambitious and touch so many hot-issues (metrics for institutional evaluation, how to beat the cost disease, the use of rankings, how to steer institutions using public funds) that the debate will echo around the world.  If you haven’t been paying attention to the Obama plan, start now.  With a 3-4 month lag, it’s pretty certain that this language will start popping up in Canada as well.

One key part of the Obama message is a focus on competency-based learning (CBL) as a way to cut time-to-degrees, especially for non-traditional students.  For this and other reasons, it’s going to be all CBL, all-the-time this year.  Expect to really sick of hearing about Western Governors University and South New Hampshire State (whose model I looked at while back, here).  This is a good thing, partly because it means we’ll have to hear less about MOOCs but also because CBL has the potential to generating genuinely useful conversations about what “outcomes” and “degrees” mean, and that’s long overdue.

In Canada, we have all the makings of a memorable year, financially.  Higher education institutions in Alberta have already been kicked hard; in Ontario and Quebec, all the signs are for zero growth in government income at best, and with institutions still locking in faculty salary increases of 4-5% per year once RTR is accounted for, it’s going to be Come to Jesus time at several institutions very soon.

(Yes, seriously, 4-5%.  Notice how neither University of Ottawa nor the faculty union is revealing details of the strike-averting settlement earlier this month?  They’re terrified of releasing it; pleading poverty to government while handing over 4-year 20% pay hikes to people making an average of $115K/year is really hard.)

Maybe that zero income wouldn’t look so bad if money was still coming in like gangbusters from students.  But it’s not.   This summer’s foreign service strike may result in major lost revenues in colleges and universities.  And even if it doesn’t, there’s trouble lurking in foreign recruitment waters due to a general slowdown in the BRIC economies and the tanking of the Indian rupee.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.  It’s going to be rough – but there’s a chance we might start to see some interesting structural change, too.

So…are you ready to go?