Category: Data

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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The Australian Experiment in Cutting Red Tape

One thing everybody hates is red tape – especially pointless reporting requirements which take up time, money and deliver little to no value.  Of late, Canadian universities have been talking more and more about various types of reporting burden and how they’d really like being freed from some of it.  For those interested in this subject, it’s instructive to see how the issue has been handled in Australia. The peak university body in Australia (called – appropriately – Universities Australia)

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Who’s More International?

We sometimes think about international higher education as being “a market”. This is not quite true: it’s actually several markets. Back in the day, international education was mostly about graduate students; specifically, at the doctoral level. Students did their “basic” education at home and then went abroad to get research experience or simply emigrate and become part of the host country’s scientific structure. Nobody sought these students for their money; to the contrary these students were usually getting paid in some

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Lying With Statistics, BC Edition

A couple of weeks ago I came across a story in the Vancouver Sun quoting a Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC (FPSE) “report” (actually more of a backgrounder) which contained two eye-catching claims:  “per-student operating grants have declined by 20 per cent since 2001 when adjusted for inflation.”  “government revenues from tuition fees have increased by almost 400 per cent since 2001” The subtext here is clear.  20% down vs. 400% up?  How heinous!  How awful can the Government of British

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Unit of Analysis

The Globe carried an op-ed last week from Ken Coates and Douglas Auld, who are writing a paper for the MacDonald Laurier institute on the evaluation of Canadian post-secondary institutions. At one level, it’s pretty innocuous (“we need better/clearer data”) but at another level I worry this approach is going to take us all down a rabbit hole. Or rather, two of them. The first rabbit hole is the whole “national approach” thing. Coates and Auld don’t make the argument

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