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Category: Academia

Degrees that Matter

One of the huge – and insufficiently studied – differences between North America and European higher education is the way programs are structured, at least as far as Arts and Sciences go. In most of Europe, entering a program in (say) history means you have to learn a set field of knowledge and skills.  By entering into a 90-credit program in a particular field, you have a fair idea of which courses you will be taking over the next three

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January 26, 2018 1 Comment

Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 2)

Today I want to go back to that COU report on academic staff I described yesterday (mind-blowing because of how much previously unavailable data it provided) and pick up on the other set of issues it raised: namely, the status of part-time and non-tenure track staff (ie. sessionals). The data is not perfect, but it is by several orders of magnitude the best thing ever published on the subject.  So here goes. The report makes a distinction between tenure stream

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January 24, 2018 2 Comments

Public Service

I have a strong message today. It’s mostly for people in social science fields (especially Deans and Department heads), but I think Provosts, VPs Research and President will want to pay attention.  The message is this: the academic profession in Canada desperately needs to take its head out of its collective behind when it comes to public service. Universities have a schizophrenic attitude when it comes to public service.  Ask any university President about the value of their institution to

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January 11, 2018 3 Comments

Replacing Permanent Faculty

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

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December 11, 2017 5 Comments

The Cost of an Aging Professoriate

You may have read recently about how Canada is really sticking it to junior researchers.  Dalhousie’s Julia Wright recently wrote about Canada haemorrhaging early-career research capacity and she has a point – just in the last seven years, the proportion of Canadian faculty aged 40 or less has fallen by a third, from roughly 22% to just over 15%. The question, of course, is “why”?  Some – including Wright – just blame a “shrinking academic labour market”, which tends to (either by

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December 6, 2017 7 Comments
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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.

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