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Category: Canada

Hiring Decisions

One of the more thoughtful replies I received to my piece on CAUT’s politicization of university accounting pointed out that one of the reasons people didn’t trust university accounting was because they made seemingly incomprehensible decisions with respect to hiring.  How was it, my reader asked, that there was plenty of money to hire sessionals but never money to hire full-time, permanent faculty?  Isn’t that money fungible?  Why spend on one and not the other? I can see why this might

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January 31, 2017 4 Comments

Truth and Reconciliation

Last week, the University of Toronto’s Truth and Reconciliation Steering Committee released its final report, which sets out the institution’s response to the TRC’s Calls to Action. This seems like a good time to update my previous coverage on this. First, I should say that on the whole I have been impressed by the response of the country’s universities and colleges to the TRC. I think there has been a commendable level of commitment shown by institutional leaders in trying to

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January 30, 2017 1 Comment

A Slice of Canadian Higher Education History

There are a few gems scattered through Statistics Canada’s archives. Digging around their site the other day, I came across a fantastic trove of documents published by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (as StatsCan used to be called) called Higher Education in Canada. The earliest number in this series dates from 1938, and is available here. I urge you to read the whole thing, because it’s a hoot. But let me just focus in on a couple of points in

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January 27, 2017 4 Comments

An Amazing Statscan Skills Study

I’ve been hard on Statscan lately because of their mostly-inexcusable data collection practices.  But every once in awhile the organization redeems itself.  This week, that redemption takes the form of an Analytical Studies Branch research paper by Marc Frenette and Kristyn Frank entitled Do Postsecondary Graduates Land High-Skilled Jobs?  The implications of this paper are pretty significant, but also nuanced and susceptible to over-interpretation.  So let’s go over in detail what this paper’s about. The key question Frenette & Frank

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January 26, 2017 2 Comments

The Science Policy Review

So, any day now, the report of the Government of Canada’s Science Policy review should be appearing.  What is that, you ask?  Good question. “Science policy” is one of those tricky terms.  Sometimes it can mean science as a way of making policy (like when someone claims they want all policy to be “evidence-based); sometimes it’s about policy for or about Science, and the rules and regulations under which it is funded.  This particular Science policy review, chaired by former U

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January 25, 2017 1 Comment

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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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