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Category: Canada

A Second Thought About Half-Way Through A Pretty Awful Day

Forgive the intrusion.  But our neighbour to the South electing a quasi-fascist narcissist isn’t an every day occasion.  There are some significant short-term consequences for Canadian higher education, and I thought I would just quickly enumerate them so that debate and preparation can begin. First, the chances of a recession in the next couple of years just shot up quite a bit.  Tearing up NAFTA also means tearing up the FTA: there will be a pause in business investment while

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November 9, 2016 2 Comments

Scientific Journal Prices & Library Purchasing Power

Last week’s pieces on libraries generated a fair bit of comment (I get the impression librarians don’t get attention that often).  So I thought I would come back for another pass on the subject. First a couple of clarifications.  First, apparently CARL’s data for UNB includes expenditures at both campuses while the student data relates only to the Fredericton campus.  So all those per-student expenditure figures for UNB?  They need to be cut by about 20%.  Also, I think I

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November 1, 2016 1 Comment

What could a new private university in Canada look like?

Yesterday I outlined why a major private university has never emerged in Canada.  But I also suggested that it wasn’t impossible one might pop up in the future if it were backed by someone with sufficiently deep pockets and an eye for strategy.  Here is what I mean by this: For a private university to be a success, it needs to be getting thousands of students.  Say 4,000 or so.  It’s not impossible to operate below that level, but it’s precarious. 

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October 25, 2016 2 Comments

A Prairie Round-up

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll know that every spring I put together a little summary of provincial budgets and what they mean for higher education.  A few days ago I decided to put together a slide comparing the cumulative changes in provincial funding since 2011.  Here’s what it looks like, in inflation-adjusted dollars. Figure 1: Change in real provincial government transfers to institutions, 2011-2 to 2016-17 What should immediately jump out at you (apart from the

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October 21, 2016 No Comments

Presidential Salary Comparisons

The President of Iowa State University was recently reprimanded for crashing one school-owned airplane, overusing the other, and charging the cost to the institution.  The institution’s Board is asking serious questions: such as “why they were paying for the President to go back and forth to his family-owned Christmas Tree business in North Carolina,”  but not, apparently, “why in God’s name does our university own two aeroplanes?” As one does. As I read this story, I thought “if nothing else,

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October 18, 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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