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Category: Canada

Sessionals: Equal Pay for Equal Work?

Following up on yesterday’s piece about counting sessionals, I thought it would be a useful time to address how sessionals get paid.  Every so often, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) issues a press release asking that contract faculty get “equal pay for work of equal value”.  And who could be against that?  But what they don’t say, because no one wants to say this out loud is that, in Canada , adjuncts and sessionals are far from being underpaid:

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September 20, 2016 4 Comments

OECD data says still no underfunding

The OECD’s annual datapalooza-tastic publication Education at a Glance was released yesterday.  The pdf is available for free here.  Let me take you through a couple of the highlights around Higher Education. For the following comparisons, I show Canada against the rest of the G7 (minus Italy because honestly, economically, who cares?), plus Australia because it’s practically our twin, Korea because it’s cool, Sweden because someone always asks about Scandinavia and the OECD average because hey that just makes sense. 

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September 16, 2016 No Comments

Innovation Policy: Are Universities Part of the Problem?

We’re talking a lot about Innovation in Canada these days. Especially in universities, where innovation policy is seen as a new cash funnel. I would like to suggest that this attitude on the part of universities is precisely part of Canada’s problem when it comes to Innovation. Here’s the basic issue: innovation – the kind that expands the economy – is something that firms do. They take ideas from here and there and put them together to create new processes

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September 15, 2016 4 Comments

The Canadian Way of Study Abroad

A few years ago, I think around the time that HESA Towers ran a conference on internationalization, I realized there was something weird about the way Canadian higher education institutions talked about study abroad.  They talked about it as helping students “bridge the gap between theory and practice”, “increasing engagement”, and “hands-on learning”. That’s odd, I thought.  That sounds like experiential learning, not study abroad.  Which is when it hit me: in Canada, unlike virtually everywhere else in the world,

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September 14, 2016 2 Comments

How Many Canadian Students Study Abroad? How Many Should?

If you look at the current issue of Policy Options, there is a startling claim made in the sub-headline of an article by Universities Australia CEO Belinda Robinson; namely, that “five times as many Australian undergraduates are studying abroad as their Canadian counterparts”.  It’s not a claim Robinson herself makes – it seems likely that it’s been added by the editorial staff at Policy Options.  The problem is it’s not correct. The Canadian numbers come from a periodic survey Universities

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September 12, 2016 4 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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