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Category: Canada

The Ontario College Strike

Ontario College Professors, represented by the Ontario Public Sector Employee’s Union (OPSEU) went on strike Monday morning.  A few thoughts on where we are and what might happen: OPSEU’s final settlement offer published on the weekend (available here) is a heck of a long way from what they were proposing a couple of weeks ago.  They’ve given up literally everything on workloads and the (frankly ludicrous) demand for academic Senates at all institutions and some other stuff besides.  From this you can either infer

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October 17, 2017 3 Comments

Atlantic Blues

One big story from out east that didn’t get a lot of play in the rest of the country was the news that the Nova Scotia government had, over the period 2013-2017, quietly bailed out Acadia University to the tune of $24 million.  This is of course the second time a Nova Scotia government has bailed out this decade: the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) received about $10 million. This isn’t really a partisan thing: it was an NDP

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October 2, 2017 No Comments

Some Surprising (?) Data on Canadian University Expenditures

I’ve been doing some work on financial data of higher education institutions around the world, and specifically looking at what’s been going on at top research institutions compared to everyone else.  And I thought maybe you all would be interested in what I’ve found for Canada. For the purpose of this document, I have separated the six institutions in Canada which always come top in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka “Shanghai Rankings”) – that’s Toronto, UBC, McGill, McMaster,

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September 27, 2017 1 Comment

Growth of Presidential Compensation

Let’s do another blog on this topic because everyone loves talking executive compensation. Yesterday we looked at Presidential pay in international comparison and saw that Canadian university Presidents have fairly low pay compared to equivalents in other English-speaking countries.  But, one might argue, that’s the wrong metric.  Maybe the real problem isn’t high pay so much as a relatively quick rise in pay over the past few years. That’s a fair argument.  But let’s see what the data says. My data source

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September 19, 2017 No Comments

NDP Leadership Race Notes

So the deadline to sign up for the federal NDP leadership passed a couple of weeks ago, and the first deadline for the mail-in ballots is next Monday.  So what to make of the four candidates and their views on post-secondary education?   Based on their platforms and a series of responses to a questionnaire on Science policy from Evidence for Democracy (responses available here), my take is as follows: Jagmeet Singh.  Nothing.  He has a lot of policy proposals on various topics

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September 12, 2017 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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