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Agamemnon's avatar

NB universities have lost market share of NB-sourced students and of Canada-sourced students over the long run. Nice to see these trade balance figures as another corroborating data point.

Why? Seems to me like we didn't expand offering in our core strengths. We were over-weight on fields that turned out not to be popular (e.g. most liberal arts fields) and likely because we didn't react to this by reinvesting in those fields that were proving popular (probably in part because the losses were creating tightness, but also because universities aren't set up to redeploy resources too readily.)

I've always thought that universities should publish more statistics about the student usage of their offerings (course and program level). We need mechanisms like this to counterbalance the inherent conservatism of university governance/structure. Maybe funding within universities to its' programs should be a little more constrained to the most productive units (which would also encourage more accurate pricing). Not saying 100%, but help departments make the connection to revenue enough and maybe they become more proactive.

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