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Tag: Systems

History of PSE in Canada Part VIII: What it All Means

Thanks for sticking with me through my highly unofficial and deeply idiosyncratic history of Canadian PSE. I suppose if it doesn’t meet standards of historical inquiry, at least you all now have a pretty good sense of my priorities when it comes to understanding developments in Canadian higher education. Looking back at the full sweep of Canadian PSE’s history, it’s worth thinking about the paths we didn’t take. From the first, we didn’t take the English route of having just

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October 26, 2018 2 Comments

What Makes Canada Unique in Post-Secondary Education

[the_ad id=”12142″] An Australian colleague of mine once suggested to me that I built my career primarily on filling in the holes in Statistics Canada’s severely limited PSE stats.  I don’t think this is actually true, but it probably is fair to say that some of the breaks in my career have involved explaining Canadian PSE to the rest of the world in terms they can understand.  Partly, that involves being able to describe Canada as a single system of

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April 27, 2018 3 Comments

The New Third Pillar

There is a revolution going on in Ontario’s higher education system, but remarkably, very few people have noticed it yet.  Henceforth, Ontario will have not just a college system and a university system, but also a third category of institutions which does not have a name but which, for the moment are called Indigenous Institutes but which may well soon be called Indigenous Universities. Trust me, this is big. There have been “indigenous institutes” for nearly 35 years ago in Ontario

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January 12, 2018 1 Comment

The Canadian Way of Higher Education Co-ordination

Yesterday I talked a little bit about how competition, not co-operation, is in Canadian universities’ DNA (east of Manitoba, at any rate).  But that has never stopped governments from trying – usually fitfully and half-heartedly – from trying to create more co-ordination within the system.  David Cameron, in his 1991 book More Than an Academic Question (still probably best single-volume history of Canadian higher education), analyzed these attempts in some detail.  What’s interesting is how things have changed over time. One obvious

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November 17, 2017 2 Comments

Flagship Universities vs World-Class Universities

Almost since the “world-class” university paradigm was established fifteen years ago, the concept has faced a backlash.  The concept was too focussed on research production, it was unidimensional, it took no account of universities’ other missions, etc. etc.  Basically the argument was that if people took the world class university concept seriously, we would have a university monoculture that ignored many important facets of higher education. The latest iteration of this backlash comes in the form of the idea of

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September 21, 2017 2 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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