So, I got a bit of mail last week in response to my analysis of the COU data (as I usually do whenever I’m presenting data on academic loads) to the effect that I am being overly reductionist about the teaching loads and perhaps implying that profs aren’t working hard. Generally speaking, these comments come in two varieties and I will take the time to answer each of them. The first line of critique has to do with unit of
It’s all-Council-of-Ontario-Universities this week on the blog, but that’s because they’re the ones putting out the great data. Today, it’s the annual survey on graduate outcomes which looks at how bachelor’s degree graduates are faring in the labour market. Standard caveat: Ontario =/= Canada, but it produces nearly half the country’s bachelor degrees so it’s bound to be close to the national average and the trends you see here are unlikely to be much different that those you see anywhere else. Figure 1 shows
Today I want to go back to that COU report on academic staff I described yesterday (mind-blowing because of how much previously unavailable data it provided) and pick up on the other set of issues it raised: namely, the status of part-time and non-tenure track staff (ie. sessionals). The data is not perfect, but it is by several orders of magnitude the best thing ever published on the subject. So here goes. The report makes a distinction between tenure stream
Buckle up everyone. COU just did what universities have been telling everyone for years was impossible: publishing actual useful admin data on faculty workloads and sessionals from every university in Ontario bar the University of Toronto (speculate away as to why this is: the footnotes imply it’s because it couldn’t put together the data together properly). It’s all right here. Read it. It’s the best data ever put together on Canadian faculty. Oddly enough, COU published this yesterday with no fanfare
As you all know, I spend a lot of time analyzing university finances, mainly because the data is easy to get and is quite detailed (Canadian higher education statistics are disastrous in many ways, but one area where our stats are better than almost anywhere else in the world is our institutional financial reporting – the FIUC Survey is genuinely world-class). But I normally don’t spend the same amount of time on community college, which is something I’d like to change starting
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