By Alex Usher. Yesterday I talked a bit about some basic rules of branding in universities, and why some of the wailing about the similarity of university brands are kind of overdone.  The key reason for this is because in fact most universities are competing in a very local market with only a few genuine competitors.  So yeah, maybe there are only a half-dozen genuinely unique brand-types out there, but as long as you have fewer than six direct competitors, that’s not necessarily a problem. More...

By Alex Usher. Every once in awhile you see a news story saying something along the lines of “oh my, so many people in their 20s living with their failure to launch, my God, won’t somebody do something” followed usually by some freaking out about housing prices and – if we’re really lucky – something about humanities and working at Starbucks as well.  Like this one from the CBC last week. More...

By Alex Usher. Universitas 21 is one of the higher-prestige university alliances out there (McGill, Melbourne and the National University of Singapore are among its members).  Now like a lot of university alliances it doesn’t actually do much. The Presidents or their alternates meet every year or so, they have some moderately useful inter-institution mobility schemes, that kind of thing.  But the one thing it does which gets a lot of press is that it issues a ranking every year.  Not of universities, of course (membership organizations which try to rank their own members tend not to last long), but rather of higher education systems.  The latest one is available here. More...

By Alex Usher. In the last five years or so, I’ve seen a real change in the way Aboriginal students are moving through the country’s PSE system.  For a whole number of reasons, aboriginal students were traditionally concentrated either in humanities disciplines like history and sociology, or they were in disciplines which led to careers in social services or direct band employment (child care, police foundations, education, nursing).  STEM and Business fields simply weren’t in the picture. More...

By Alex Usher. I recently came across an interesting blogpost from a professor in the UK named Thomas Leeper (see here), talking about the way in which professors the world over spend so much time duplicating each others’ work in terms of developing curricula. More...

By Alex Usher. It’s a metaphor that’s been used in more than one way.  The unbundling allusion is mostly to the music industry which has seen technology allow consumers to unbundle its main product (albums) into smaller discrete chunks (songs), but there are also allusions here to the cable TV industry and to journalism.  Universities, it is argued, provide a whole bunch of disparate services, not all of which are of equal quality or are equally desired by the customer. More...