Category: Funding and Finances

How to Fund (2)

As I noted yesterday, in Canada we have some kind of phobia about output-based funding.  In the 1990s, Ontario and Alberta introduced, and then later killed, key performance indicators with funding attached.  Quebec used to pay some money out to institutions based on the number of degrees awarded, not just students enrolled, but they killed that a few years ago too (I’m sure the rumour that it did so because McGill did particularly well on that metric is totally unfounded).

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How to Fund (1)

Over the next three days, I want to talk about funding formulas.  I know I did this a couple of years ago, at the start of the Ontario funding formula review exercise (see here, here, and here, but it’s worth revisiting  partly because I’m cheesed off at how Ontario managed to botch the review, but also, it’s because I’ve been looking at funding formulas in Europe and the US for article I’ve been writing, and it’s absolutely stunning to me how

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New York, New York

With the Republicans in control of both Congress and the White house for at least the next two years, the fight for “free tuition” is moving to the state level.  And so to New York, where Governor Cuomo has proposed a form of “free tuition” for anyone attending the City University of New York (CUNY) or the State University of New York (SUNY) and whose family earns less than $125,000.  So what does this mean exactly? Well, to be clear,

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Hiring Decisions

One of the more thoughtful replies I received to my piece on CAUT’s politicization of university accounting pointed out that one of the reasons people didn’t trust university accounting was because they made seemingly incomprehensible decisions with respect to hiring.  How was it, my reader asked, that there was plenty of money to hire sessionals but never money to hire full-time, permanent faculty?  Isn’t that money fungible?  Why spend on one and not the other? I can see why this might

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A Slice of Canadian Higher Education History

There are a few gems scattered through Statistics Canada’s archives. Digging around their site the other day, I came across a fantastic trove of documents published by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (as StatsCan used to be called) called Higher Education in Canada. The earliest number in this series dates from 1938, and is available here. I urge you to read the whole thing, because it’s a hoot. But let me just focus in on a couple of points in

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