Category: Canada

Yesterday, I began outlining how the Nova Scotia government is trying to measure university program costs, and got as far as working out how the scheme was capturing certain facts about program income (excluding government grants and fees of students yet to declare a program) and certain facts about expenditures (excluding infrastructure, student services, IT, and roughly 60% of tenured professors’ salaries and benefits) and considered various ways that some assumptions about how to distribute both costs and revenues were

You may have heard of the program costing exercise (as part of an Academic Program Review) that the government of Nova Scotia has foisted on the institutions in that province. Today, I am going to go through how the exercise is being conducted as well as a few ways in which I find it lacking. Before I start, two nota benes (notas bene?). First, no one has paid HESA to do this analysis. This is a labour of…well, not love,