Tag: Student Services

A New Focus for Student Unions

It’s that time of year when student elections are on and occasionally I get asked a question like “what’s the future of student unions?” and “what could student unions be doing better”?  These are good questions. Here’s my answer. For the most part, student union budgets go into providing “services”.  Often, an awful lot of this ends up simply paying for light, heat and maintenance of student union buildings.  Big chunks also go to managing and overseeing the vast number

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One Lens for Viewing “Administrative Bloat”

The Globe’s Gary Mason wrote an interesting article yesterday about the Gupta resignation.  Actually, let me qualify: he wrote a very odd article, which ignored basically everything his Globe colleagues Simona Chiose and Frances Bula had reported the previous week, in order to peddle a tale in which the UBC Board fired Gupta for wanting to reduce administrative costs. This, frankly, sounds insane.  But Mason’s article did include some very eye-opening statistics on the increase of administrative staff at UBC over the past

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The “Standard Model” in Aboriginal Services

One of the things I’ve noticed about services provided to Aboriginal students in Canadian PSE is that somehow, Canadian institutions have all arrived at essentially the same model.  Here it is: The recruitment function: If you’re going to recruit on-reserve, you need someone to visit reserves.  Repeatedly. First Nations students aren’t going to make a multi-year commitment to you unless you visit them, look them in the eye and tell them “you can succeed with us and we’ll do what

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Can You Build Your Way to Happiness?

With a half dozen universities currently planning upgrades to their athletics facilities, it’s worth asking the question: what’s the impact of these things on student satisfaction? (Yes…we know…satisfaction isn’t everything. But it’s not nothing, either. And it has the singular value of being measurable, so…onwards!) We have two recent case studies here. In 2009, Queen’s completed a new $230 million athletics complex, while in 2010, Trent completed an $18 million renovation to its own athletics building. What kind of effects

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