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Category: Data

Cultural Determinants of Data Acquisition Costs

I saw a fascinating piece in the New York Times awhile back.  It was about a trend at American universities, asking applicants if they were gay or not.  Apparently, these institutions believe that by asking students this question, they are sending a message that they are a gay-positive environment. Interesting. Americans think that transparency about identity is the path to utopia.  Enrolment statistics by race?  They’ve got them.  Indeed, they are required to keep such statistics, because of a clutch of laws

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September 19, 2013 3 Comments

Financing Canadian Universities: A Self-Inflicted Wound (Part 5)

We’ve covered a lot of ground in the last few days.  Back on Tuesday, we asked the question why faculty-student ratios could fall by 20% over two decades when per-student income had jumped by 40% over the same period.  The best way to sum up the answer is with the following graph: Changes in Total and Operating Income per Student, Academic Salary Mass, and Student-Teacher Ratios, Indexed to 1992               The top line is

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September 13, 2013 5 Comments

Financing Canadian Universities: A Curious Story (Part 3)

Yesterday, we saw that Canadian student-faculty ratios rose by 24% between 1992 and 2010, even though operating grants per student went up by 20%.  The cause, it turned out, was a combination of individual academic salaries rising, while aggregate academic wages fell, as a proportion of operating grants.  What we didn’t do yesterday was ponder why academic salary mass didn’t keep up with operating grants, and where the money went as a result. Figure 1 – Operating Expenditures by Category,

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September 11, 2013 4 Comments

Financing Canadian Universities: A Curious Story (Part 2)

So yesterday we noted how universities’ per-student income had increased 40%.  But we also noted that it’s a universally acknowledged truth that pretty much everyone in higher ed will swear up and down that things are worse than ever, always doing more with less, etc.  Is there a way to reconcile these competing notions without simply coming to the conclusion that profs and administrators are delusional/greedy? Well, sort of.  Let’s start with Figure 1. Figure 1 – Income per FTE Student

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September 10, 2013 7 Comments

Financing Canadian Universities: A Curious Story (Part 1)

if you pay attention to discussions of higher education funding, one of the memes that inevitably pops up revolves around the notion that higher education has been under some brutal, neo-liberal assault since… well, I’m not sure, but probably since 1995 at least, and everything is being defunded, laid on the backs of students, it’s the end of civilization, dark ages ahead, etc., etc. Problem is, this yarn is utterly at odds with the data, which tells a very different

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September 9, 2013 2 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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