Category: Canada

Dual-Track Tuition

The University of Saskatchewan made the Times Higher Education last week when the UK weekly ran a story on the University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and its scheme to admit an extra 25 students per year, provided they pay the full cost of instruction, which is a shade over $60,000. This is about $50,000 more than what students admitted through the current intake process currently pay.  This is not about raising tuition for everyone: it’s about two-tier tuition. There’d be one rate for “top”

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More Fun with Faculty Salary Data

Morning all.  Yesterday I promised you more faculty data analysis, and I am going to start by looking at variation in pay by institution.  I’m going to be deliberately provocative by showing people the distribution of salaries at the level where they vary the most: full professorships.  Ready? Figure 1: Average Salaries of Full Professors by Institution (and yes, the X-axis is unreadable, do you know how many institutions there are in this country?), Canada, 2018-19 The point I want to underline

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Counter-intuitive Faculty Salary Data

I haven’t taken a good look at faculty salary data in about three years, so it seems about time to catch up on what’s going on out there.  Let’s jump right in. Here’s the big headline: for the first time in about two decades, average faculty salaries are declining in real terms, albeit from quite high levels.  Among full professors and the faculty as a whole, the drop in inflation-adjusted salaries is about 3% since 2014-15; for associates and assistant

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Postcard from Alberta (2)

Yesterday, I discussed the peculiarities of Alberta’s financial reporting system for post-secondary education and how it reflects the province’s controlling approach towards post-secondary institutions (if you don’t believe me, ask anyone who’s been a senior admin at both an Albertan institution and one from another province, and see how often they get calls from Ministers and senior government officials).  Today, I want to talk about how that approach is likely to sabotage the governing United Conservative Party’s goals when it

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That New Alberta Performance Funding Scheme

On Monday, the Alberta Government released some details about the Performance-Based Funding (PBF) scheme it wants to implement for next year.  Herewith, the lowdown. The Good News: It’s a performance-based funding scheme, which leapfrogs Alberta about two stages ahead of where it currently is in terms of funding planning (it is currently one of the largest jurisdictions in the world with no funding formula at all).  And it avoided copying the more bone-headed indicators that Ontario chose to use (for details

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