On the off chance you’re wandering through the halls of academia (non-COVID halls, anyway) and feel like picking a fight with another wanderer, the best advice I can give you is to use these three words: “students” “are” “customers”. See? Half of you probably want to fight me right now. But what I want to argue today is that while there are circumstances where that three-word statement is untrue, for the most part it is not untrue in the way
Written in collaboration with Michael Sullivan Good morning, all. Today’s blog is a collaboration with my colleague Michael Sullivan at the Strategic Counsel (with whom we at HESA Towers have been doing some joint projects over the past year or so) and it’s about the results of a new recently completed survey, which looks at students’ learning experiences since the start of this academic year. It’s an interesting half-full half-empty story, but with some very important future implications. Figure 1
One of the constant tensions in University and College management is working out which services need to be delivered centrally and which can be decentralized and, if the latter, how they can be provided in a way which has at least some semblance of coherence. The deal is this: generally it’s cheaper to provide most services centrally. Doesn’t really matter what kinds of services: administrative, research, teaching and learning, internationalization, etc. Economies of scale exist, partially because you get fewer
I spent a couple of days out in Calgary this week at the annual meeting of Canadian Association of University & College Student Services (CACUSS). I had not been to one of these in quite awhile – long enough ago that the meetings could be held on a campus and not in a convention centre – and I was intrigued at some of the changes that seem to have taken place in these occupations, which I suspect reflect some significant
One of the delights of working in international higher education is that while higher education is pretty much isomorphic the world over, it’s not entirely so. There’s not so much variation that expertise isn’t transferable, but not so little that you can’t be learn something new by appreciating another country’s system. One are of particular interest is student accommodations and student services. In North America we take it for granted that student services and residence are a responsibility of institutions –
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