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Category: Canada

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

Universal co-op, Minister? You first.

Back in June here in Ontario, the Premier’s Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel released its final report. One of the recommendations was that every Ontario high school and university student should have at least one mandatory co-op experience (i.e., once in high school, once in university college).  In a statement in the provincial legislature, the Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Development Deb Matthews essentially said she liked the recommendation and would be working in the coming months to figure out

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October 17, 2016 No Comments

Peas in a Pod

A few weeks ago, there was an absolutely hysterical story on CBC about a Fraser Institute report on carbon taxes.  You can read the article for yourself, but the argument was basically this: carbon taxes are bad because they would have a disproportionate effect on people in lower income brackets. Assuming you believe the Fraser Institute actually gives a rat’s hairy behind about people in lower income brackets, this is not an entirely stupid point; multiple studies in the US

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October 3, 2016 3 Comments
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