Recently, I asked my Twitter followers who taught in universities about the part of their job they liked the least. I asked because I am pretty convinced Canadian higher education isn’t going to get through the next decade or so without some reasonably big changes in the way faculty spend their time. Here’s my basic assumption: as I noted back here, we’re on the brink of a pretty big increase in youth numbers. The best guess is that the number
About a month ago, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put out a report on precarious employment in Ontario universities and colleges. One good thing about this document at the outset: it has an imaginative research design. There is so much we do not know, and in the absence of any detailed reporting by institutions themselves cannot know about employment in post-secondary institutions. To get around this, the report’s authors, Erika Shaker and Robin Shaban, gather data from the Labour Force Survey,
Buckle up everyone. COU just did what universities have been telling everyone for years was impossible: publishing actual useful admin data on faculty workloads and sessionals from every university in Ontario bar the University of Toronto (speculate away as to why this is: the footnotes imply it’s because it couldn’t put together the data together properly). It’s all right here. Read it. It’s the best data ever put together on Canadian faculty. Oddly enough, COU published this yesterday with no fanfare
Last week, I wrote a piece about how the professoriate is aging and how these aging professors are taking up an increasing fraction of university budgets. My back of the envelope calculation suggested that for the extra $1.15 billion we are spending on this group compared to 15 years ago, we might be able to hire as many as 10,000 new, younger profs and thus help renew the professoriate. (To be clear this would not mean 10,000 extra professors, it would mean a little
On Sunday night, the University of Manitoba and its faculty union hashed out a tentative deal to end a three-week strike. No details are publicly available yet, but I think the dispute – and the likely strategies used to resolve it – are a useful way of understanding some general concepts around the economics of universities in Canada. Directly or indirectly, institutions get their operating funds from having students sit in classrooms. Tuition fees are directly related to credit hours
One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.
