The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Budgets

Not Mutually Exclusive

One often hears university administrators say things like: “if we don’t reduce growth in salary mass, we’re all in trouble”.  Sometimes, the word “academic” gets thrown in front of salaries, for good measure.  In response, one often hears faculty unions say: “but academic salaries are down as a proportion of operating spending since 1992”, or “salaries as a proportion of the budget have remained constant in recent years”, and conclude from this that salaries can’t possibly be the problem. How

Read More »
April 7, 2015 9 Comments

Budget Denialism

You’ve heard of climate change denialism?  The use of spurious, crap data to try to undermine public acceptance of the well-established phenomenon of climate change?  Well, there’s something sweeping Canadian campuses that’s very similar.  I call it budget denialism.  Let me show you some examples from two universities in particular: Dalhousie and Wilfrid Laurier. The Dal budget is here.  The focus of complaints at Dalhousie has been the $5.6 million cut to “faculties”.  Now, when you hear the word “faculties”,

Read More »
March 25, 2015 5 Comments

Getting Mugged By Your Own Government

Good morning from Maputo, where word has reached me regarding a truly awful piece of government policy emanating from Regina. Page 14 of the provincial budget briefly suggests that something miraculous has occurred in provincial funding policy: This budget provides 1.0 per cent operating increases for universities, affiliated colleges and regional colleges and 2.0 per cent operating increases for technical institutes and federated colleges.  Overall, the 2015-16 Budget includes $661.2 million in post-secondary operating and targeted funding, a reduction of $8.17 million

Read More »
March 23, 2015 No Comments

Accusations About Operating Surpluses

One interesting development in labour-management relations over the past few years has been the increasing tendency of academic unions to claim that administration is spending “too much” on capital, and is raiding the operating budget (i.e. salaries) to pay for it.  It’s possible that there is some truth to this in some places, but on the whole there seems to be a misunderstanding about the difference between how the terms “operating” and “capital” are defined in budgets, and how they

Read More »
February 6, 2015 4 Comments

Classroom Economics (The End)

So we spent Monday looking at the economic basics of classroom and teaching loads, and Tuesday looking at how difficult it is to improve the situation by increases in tuition or government grants.  Wednesday we saw that reducing average academic compensation (presumably via increasing the proportion of credits taught by adjuncts) can be quite effective in reducing teaching loads, while on Thursday we saw how trying to achieve a similar effect through attacking costs other than academic compensation would require enormously painful – and probably

Read More »
January 23, 2015 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...