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Tag: Admissions

The Collapsing Demand for Law School

If there is one place bucking the worldwide trend of rising higher education enrolments, it’s American law schools. As the New York Times noted last week, demand for US law schools is down by something like 40% over the last two years.  The effect on enrolments hasn’t been as pronounced – excess demand meant that schools were collectively only meeting about 60% of total demand in 2010.  But inevitably, outside the very top tier, all schools are cutting admissions standards in

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February 8, 2013 No Comments

Narcissism of Small Differences – Admissions Edition

Why do Canadian universities make admissions so complicated? A couple of years ago, for a client, I took a look at the number of different undergraduate admissions requirements there were to various universities.  What I found was that at comprehensive universities in Ontario, there tended to be no fewer that 15 separate sets of admission requirements to various programs or faculties, and at some universities it was as high as 20. Nearly all of them required grade 12 English (though

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November 8, 2012 1 Comment

UBC Gets It

Credit where credit is due: some absolutely brilliant stuff has been coming out of UBC in the last little while. Everybody in the country should pay attention. Exhibit A: The university’s decision to use broad-based admissions (BBA) – that is to say, an application process which takes into account not just grades, but also extra-curricular activities and the contents of personal essays – for its entire student intake. This is an enormously positive step. Just as the university experience is

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February 1, 2012 No Comments

Distinct Missions

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

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January 25, 2012 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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