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Category: Funding and Finances

Arguing for Science in All the Wrong Ways

You can tell it’s pre-budget consultation time in Ottawa because university Presidents are writing op-eds about the importance of research and backing the Naylor Report.  But man, are they ever unconvincing. Let’s start with University of Toronto President Meric Gertler’s September 12th Toronto Star op-ed entitled “Don’t Let the World Pass Us By on Science”.  The sentiment is fine, I suppose, but the specific evidence Gertler uses to back up his claim is – to put it politely – weak.  It says

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September 26, 2017 2 Comments

Growth of Presidential Compensation

Let’s do another blog on this topic because everyone loves talking executive compensation. Yesterday we looked at Presidential pay in international comparison and saw that Canadian university Presidents have fairly low pay compared to equivalents in other English-speaking countries.  But, one might argue, that’s the wrong metric.  Maybe the real problem isn’t high pay so much as a relatively quick rise in pay over the past few years. That’s a fair argument.  But let’s see what the data says. My data source

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September 19, 2017 No Comments

Presidential Compensation

Over the summer, the revelation that the University of Alberta paid Indira Samarasekera two full years of administrative leave at over $550,000 per year after the conclusion her ten-year (two-term) Presidency caused a series of snit-fits, the most notable one being this one from Paige MacPherson, the Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. As I’ve noted before (here and here), Canadian university Presidents are not that well paid, at least by the standards of other Anglosphere universities.  Paul Kniest, of Australia’s National Tertiary

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September 18, 2017 1 Comment

Notes on the Finances of China’s Top Universities

One of my distractions over the past summer has been to learn more about Chinese universities.  And, fortunately, this is becoming a lot easier as Chinese universities are starting to put more of their data online.  Today, I just want to take you through a bit of a tour of China’s top universities (roughly the equivalent of the US Ivy League), which are known as the “C9”, most of which now put their financial data online. So let’s start just

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September 14, 2017 No Comments

Some Curious Data From OECD Education at a Glance 2017

The OECD put out its annual Education at a Glance  publication yesterday.  No huge surprises except for the fact that they appear to have killed one of the most-used tables in the whole book (A.1.2, which compared tertiary attainment rates for 25-34 year olds by type of tertiary program – i.e. college v. university) which is an enormous bummer.  The finance data says what it pretty much always says: Canada is the #2 spender overall on higher education at 2.6% of GDP

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September 13, 2017 No 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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