Category: Canada

Distinct Missions

Why are Canadian universities so scared of acting differently from one another?  Why does no one want a niche? I’m not just talking about their cookie-cutter mission statements here, which seem to involve adding the words “research” and “excellence” to the output of a random word generator. I’m talking about the cookie-cutter ways they go about their daily business. In marketing-speak: they have little or no brand personality. It’s not as though cool niche missions are that hard to dream

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Comparative Salary Data – Canada vs. U.S.

Yesterday, we looked at trends in Canadian faculty salary data. But how does our compensation stack up again the United States? Here, I take 2009-10 U.S. salary data for professors at four-year institutions from the AAUP’s Report on the Status of the Academic Profession. For Canada, I use the same data as yesterday but add professors in medical fields. I do not adjust for currency since the dollar is roughly at par. The comparison looks like this: Canada vs. U.S.

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A Good Decade for Profs

I was browsing through some Statistics Canada data on university salaries the other day, and I rapidly came to the conclusion that there have been few decades in which it was better to be a prof than the last one. As the following table shows, over the years 2001 to 2009 (the years for which I could get good-quality data from Statscan for free – this email’s not paying a paying gig unfortunately), pay for full professors in non-medical disciplines

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You Couldn’t Make It Up

This email is G-rated, so I can’t use the full range of sexual/scatological imagery needed to describe my true feelings about the Ontario government’s Tuition Rebate announcement last week. I’ll keep it to: I told you so. To recap, the Ontario Liberals made a not-particularly sensible election promise to give a 30% rebate tuition to full-time dependent students. But at least it involved giving some new money to low-income students, even if it came at the cost of providing a

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A Harper-ized Canada Student Loans Program

I rarely say this about a Jane Taber article, but her Christmas Eve piece on Prime Minister Harper’s stewarding of federal-provincial relations was mildly fascinating. Her thesis is that Harper is gradually starting to impose his vision of water-tight federalism and has a long-term plan to get the federal government to back off and let provinces get on with doing whatever they are supposed to do under Article 92 of the Constitution. So, what’s the impact on higher education? I

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