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Category: Funding and Finances

Asleep at the Switch…

… is the name of a new(ish) book by Bruce Smardon of York University, which looks at the history of federal research & development policies over the last half-century.  It is a book in equal measures fascinating and infuriating, but given that our recent change of government seems to be a time for re-thinking innovation policies, it’s a timely read if nothing else. Let’s start with the irritating.  It’s fairly clear that Smardon is an unreconstructed Marxist (I suppose structuralist is

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January 29, 2016 No Comments

Higher Education in Developing Countries is Getting Harder

Here’s the thing about universities in developing countries: they were designed for a past age.  In Latin America, the dominant model was that of Napoleon’s Universite de France – a single university for an entire country, which was all the rage among progressives for the first half of the nineteenth century.  In Africa (and parts of Asia), it was a colonial model – whatever the University of London was doing in the late 1950s, that’s basically what universities (the bigger ones, anyway)

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January 22, 2016 No Comments

Marginal Costs, Marginal Revenue

Businesses have a pretty good way of knowing when to offer more or less of a good.  It’s encapsulated in the equation MC = MR, and shown in the graphic below.                 Briefly, in the production of any good, unit-costs fall to start with as the benefits of economies of scale start to rise.  Eventually, however, if production is expanded far enough you get diseconomies of scale, and the marginal cost begins to rise.  Where the

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January 21, 2016 3 Comments

The Dollar: What Everyone in Higher Ed Needs to Know

Issues run in cycles.  Remember the skills gap?  It was a big deal back when the price of oil was over $80 a barrel.  We haven’t heard so much about it since – and judging by the way oil futures markets are behaving, it may be awhile before we hear it again. But don’t be dismayed: as one cycle disappears, another pops up somewhere else.  With the dollar having dipped slightly below 70 cents US on Tuesday, I think it’s almost certain that we’re

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January 14, 2016 No Comments

The 2015 OECD Education at a Glance

So the OECD’s Education at a Glance was published yesterday.  It’s taken a couple of months longer than usual because of the need to convert  into the new International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) system.  No, don’t ask; it’s better not to know. I won’t say there’s a whole lot new in this issue that will be of interest to PSE-types.  One point of note is that Statscan has – for no obvious or stated reason – substantially restated Canadian expenditure

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November 25, 2015 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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