By Alex Usher. Specialists sometimes like to talk as if post-secondary funding is some kind of arcane science.  But if you cut to the chase, it’s actually pretty simple.  You can tinker around the edges, and you can use different techniques to fund different parts of the system, but fundamentally there are only these five approaches. More...

By Alex Usher. In the United States, maybe the most interesting story of the last few weeks has been the student occupation of the Administration Building at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington DC.  The ostensible trigger was the revelation that several university employees had been effectively embezzling student financial aid money, but it also had deeper roots in the sub-standard housing available to university students. More...

By Alex Usher. For the next few days I want to take everyone through universities the way a Board of Governors sees them – or at least, the way a good governing Board should see them (some but not all of it applies to colleges as well; I’ll try to highlight both where possible), and that is through the lens of risk. More...

By Alex Usher. When institutions talk about risk management, they primarily mean two things: operational risks (i.e. things which might prevent the institution from going about its usual business, which we’ll deal with tomorrow), and reputational risks. More...

By Alex Usher. Ok, so we’ve been through all the prestige/reputational risk stuff (here and here), and tomorrow we will deal with financial risk.  But today, there’s the issue of straight-up operational risk: that is, the possibility that an institution (or part thereof) might not be able to open tomorrow. More...

By Alex Usher. Over the course of the last three days we’ve been talking about all kinds of risks: today, I want to talk about financial risks and particularly how institutions generate income. More...

By Alex Usher. First, ensuring that institutions are managing risk is pretty much the most important responsibility Boards of Governors have. They need the tools to understand how it is being done and where things need to improve. More...

By Alex Usher. A couple of weeks ago, the Globe and Mail published an op-ed “Beyond “the Next Silicon Valley”: Why Many Kinds of Economic Superpowers Matter” by Dalhousie University President Richard Florizone and MIT’s Scott Stern. It is, in my opinion, a better explanation of and argument for superclusters than anything the government itself has published, but it’s also a rebuttal (I think) to naysayers (like me) of the Supercluster concept, so I thought it worth reviewing some of the arguments here. More...

By Alex Usher. If you follow US higher ed news at all, you will have heard the story of Purdue University, Indiana’s other, somewhat more STEM-focussed, state university system.  Under the leadership of former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Purdue has managed to freeze in-state tuition stable for the last seven years. How is this happening, you ask. More...