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Category: Budgets

The Effects of Freezing Administrative Salaries

I see that the University of Regina council has voted to freeze both administrative salaries and the growth of administrative positions, a recurrence of an ongoing meme which blames those hated administrators for the rising cost of education.  Because Regina’s administrative practices are relatively typical of Canadian universities, I thought I would test-drive this idea: how much have administrative salaries increased, and how much wiggle room would such a freeze provide? (Full disclosure: In 2010 and 2011, HESA was contracted

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March 11, 2013 4 Comments

The Beagles Have Landed

How do you run a business when profit is meaningless? This is a key question confronting every university administration. Our PSE institutes are businesses – complex organizations which require enormous amounts of money, from diverse sources, in order to succeed. For many reasons, it is a blessing that they are not oriented towards profit. But without a clear bottom line, how do you actually know when to spend, and when not to spend? What replaces the discipline of the market,

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December 17, 2012 1 Comment

Faculty Bargaining: A Modest Proposal

Faculty bargaining is going to get nasty over the next few years. Provinces appear to be in a mood neither for increasing grants to institutions nor for allowing domestic tuition to rise. Since that’s 85-90% of most institutions’ budgets, that makes overall revenue increases very difficult. The solution from the 90s – that is, packing in more domestic students – is tougher this time out because of demographics. International students are the only significant potential source of new revenue, but

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November 23, 2012 1 Comment

77% Entitled

At HESA, we’re big on empirical evidence. We like it when people argue with data, rather than resort to the vacuous normative stuff that often passes for debate on issues like tuition fees. So, when I saw that the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers (ANSUT) had published something on out-of-control executive compensation called A Culture of Entitlement which makes extensive use of data to “shed light on the steep increases in compensation for senior administrators since 2004,” I was naturally pleased.

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September 17, 2012 2 Comments

Back to (Red) Square One

Alex Usher and Joseph Berger The Parti Québécois’ Tuesday night victory will have major effects on higher education in Quebec, but there are implications right across the country, too. Here are a few of them. Inside Quebec, things are back to square one. The PQ has already told student leaders it’s cancelling the increases to tuition; recent improvements to student aid are unlikely to stick, since they were largely going to be funded via tuition revenue – but the PQ hasn’t made any

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September 7, 2012 No 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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