juin 2019

From the Shelves of HESA Towers (III)

As each year passes, it becomes harder to remember what exactly life was like before the internet.  How did we communicate?  How did we store and retrieve information?  (A colleague recently commented on twitter that watching All the President’s Men today feels like an ad for Google because the first hour or so is just people looking through phone books). More...

Microcredentials

One of the biggest challenges we have as a country is keeping adults skilled.  Adults are far more expensive to train than young people because their labour has significant market value – it costs them money to take time off work, and their free time is limited due to things such as child or elder care.  So, if you are going to entice them into some form of education, the program you’re pushing needs above all to be i) short and ii) have labour market value. More...

Comparing Internationalization Policies

Last month the British Council and NAFSA published an interesting pair of studies, which I had the good fortune to be involved with.  Three colleagues – Janet Ilieva, Vangelis Tsigirlis and Pat Killingley – wrote the main report (which, among other things, focussed on differences within Europe) and I contributed a companion report on the Americas. More...

Trudeau vs. Harper

As we move inexorably towards a fall election (21 October, in case you’d forgotten), it is time to try to evaluate how well the present government has done on skills, science and higher education and how its record stacks up against its main competitor, the Conservative Party. More...

What Works in Reducing Inequality

A couple of weeks ago, the World Bank published a very interesting little paper which received little attention.  What Works to Reduce Inequalities in Higher Education?  A Systematic Review of the (Quasi-) Experimental Literature of Outreach and Financial Aid, by Koen Geven and Estelle Herbaut, needs to be read by everyone with an interest in expanding access to higher education. More...

Counting Foreign Students

An American colleague of mine sent me a note the other day.  “So…Canada is heading to a million foreign students? That’s huge!” 
To which my reaction was: “Wut?  Dude, it’s about a quarter of that.”
At which point my colleague emailed me a recent story from ThePIE, a nifty little London-based outlet which covers international education. More...

Hi From NAFSA

I love the annual conference of the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors (NAFSA), which is being held this week in Washington DC.  NAFSA, for uninitiated, is both a conference with lots of interesting presentations on international education (I was doing one on International Education Policies in the Americas. More...

Closing Programs

You may, over the past year, followed the story of Stevens Point, a mid-sized (8000 student) regional campus in the University of Wisconsin system.  I want to look at this story today, because I think it contains some important lessons about how universities actually make and spend their money. More...

Balanced Budgets

A few weeks ago, the federal and länder governments in Germany reached a ten-year accord with respect to funding for scientific research.  Result: a decade of planned 3% annual increases.  Needless to say, this elicited quite a few envious glances from folks in Canada, who only get funding increases in jerky fashion, often after years of neglect. More...

Does My Institution Need a Strategic Plan?

As our company’s name suggests, we think a lot about strategic planning here at HESA Towers.  And after a decade of doing this job, I have come to the conclusion that while most institutions do not spend enough time planning, too many of those that do issue plans are under the mistaken that these plans are in any way strategic. More...