Ken Steele

Ken Steele is co-founder of Academica Group, Canada’s largest market research and marketing consultancy for higher education.  He heads up Academica’s consulting group, providing guidance in branding, enrolment management and institutional strategy to colleges and universities across North America.  Ken works closely with Academica’s market research team, which conducts the most comprehensive consumer studies of post-secondary students and applicants in North America, surveying more than 300,000 of institutions and government agencies.  He is best known, however, as editor of Canada’s leading higher education news daily, Academica’s Top Ten, which serves up a daily digest of higher education news, and thought-provoking evidence of emerging trends in recruitment, marketing, and the business of academe, to more than 13,000 email subscribers. 
 
Ken is a dynamic and accomplished speaker, who delivers annually more than 100 conference keynotes, campus presentations, board retreats and strategic planning sessions. He has written numerous white papers on student recruitment marketing and institutional positioning strategy, and chapters on emerging trends and institutional branding in Strategic Enrolment Intelligence, Canada’s first book on enrolment management.
 
Over his decade-long academic career, Ken received 30 graduate and undergraduate scholarships, taught four years of undergraduate English, edited almost 100 electronic quarto and folio playtexts, wrote a dozen articles and papers for scholarly journals and conferences, and founded SHAKSPER, the first online discussion community for Shakespearean scholars, which survives now, twenty years later. He completed an Honours BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Western Ontario, an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from the University of Toronto, and all coursework and examinations toward a doctorate in Shakespearean drama.
 
Ken is an active, long-standing member of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), American Marketing Association (AMA), the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education (CCAE), The Chair Academy, and the Futurist Society, and an honorary member of the Rotary Club of London South.