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Category: Canada

Added Thoughts on Faculty Salaries

Back on Tuesday, I published some data on faculty salaries, which always gets people’ attention.  I’d like to address some of the feedback I received and make a couple of additional points.  The comments mostly converged on two areas: the appropriateness of the comparisons to the US and the interpretation of the reason for the rise in Canadian salaries. First, the US comparisons.  Some questioned the appropriateness of the dollar conversion factor.  I used Statscan’s published US-Canada PPP figure for

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December 2, 2016 7 Comments

Important Changes to Canada Student Loans

The last federal budget made one large signal improvement to student assistance: the abolition of the education tax credit, and the re-investment of that money into an improved Canada Student Grant. Less remarked upon was a promise to simplify need assessment. Now the details of that effort are emerging, and they are pretty interesting. The change has to do with the student contribution rules. In the Canadian student aid system, various forms of student income and assets are considered “resources”

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December 1, 2016 8 Comments

Faculty Salary Data

We haven’t looked at Faculty salary data in awhile.  Time for a gander. Let’s compare data from the years 2009-2010 and 2014-15: a nice round five years.  The data for 2009-2010 is from the old Statistics Canada UCASS survey, discontinued but recently revived; the 2014-14 data is from the National Faculty Data Pool, an organization set up by Canadian Universities to keep the UCASS going after it was defunded.  I have restricted the sample to the 38 institutions which appear

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November 29, 2016 3 Comments

Persuading High School Students

Over the years, a lot of people have surveyed incoming university students to find out why they chose a particular institution.  Most of these surveys contain a battery of questions about influencers: i.e. what were the sources of information that a student used to make their decision.  What researchers are looking for, usually, is some indication that school websites or career fairs or Maclean’s rankings or whatever are actually having some impact.  But year after year, students essentially give the

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November 23, 2016 2 Comments

Higher Salaries + Lower Workloads = More Sessionals

On Sunday night, the University of Manitoba and its faculty union hashed out a tentative deal to end a three-week strike.  No details are publicly available yet, but I think the dispute – and the likely strategies used to resolve it – are a useful way of understanding some general concepts around the economics of universities in Canada. Directly or indirectly, institutions get their operating funds from having students sit in classrooms.  Tuition fees are directly related to credit hours

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November 22, 2016 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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