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Category: Funding and Finances

How Universities Are Becoming More Labour-Intensive

Yesterday, I showed how universities in New Brunswick were – despite welcome new promises of stable funding from the provincial government – facing problems because salary increases were going to eat all the available new money.  Some of you possibly thought I was being alarmist.  But it’s easy enough to show how this can happen.  In Ontario, it already has. For data here, I pulled the financial statements for the last five years at the “Big 8” (Toronto, Waterloo, Western,

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January 7, 2014 5 Comments

The New Normal

Happy New Year!  Did everyone have a great vacation? The highlight of my vacation was going to Argentina and stumbling upon the world’s most unfortunately-named university in a suburb of Buenos Aires, named “Morón”.  It’s called – wait for it – Unversidad de Morón.  Seriously, their international marketing people must have the most difficult jobs in higher ed. Anyhow, I wanted to start the year by talking about what was a hopeful development from last fall – the Government of New Brunswick’s

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January 6, 2014 3 Comments

Some Free Advice for the Parti Quebecois

So I see that the Government of Quebec, far from hitting their zero deficit target this year, is in fact going to come in with a deficit of about $2.5 billion.  This means that, not only will the “reinvestment” in higher education – the money that was going to compensate institutions for not getting their promised tuition increase – not come any time soon, but it’s better than even-money that there’ll be cuts this year instead. Two points: 1)      Hey, CREPUQ! 

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November 28, 2013 No Comments

Owning the Podium

I’m sure many of you saw Western President, Amit Chakma’s, op-ed in the National Post last week, suggesting that Canadian universities need more government assistance to reach new heights of excellence, and “own the podium” in global academia.  I’ve been told that Chakma’s op-ed presages a new push by the U-15 for a dedicated set of “excellence funds” which, presumably, would end up mostly in the U-15’s own hands (for what is excellence if not research done by the U-15?).  All I can

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November 5, 2013 2 Comments

Concentration vs. Distribution

I’m spending part of this week in Shanghai at the bi-annual World-Class Universities conference, which is put on by the good folks who run the Shanghai Jiao Tong Rankings. I’ll be telling you more about this conference later, but today I wanted to pick up on a story from the last set of Shanghai rankings in August.  You’d be forgiven for missing it – Shanghai doesn’t make the news the way the Times Higher Education rankings does, because its methodology doesn’t allow

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November 4, 2013 4 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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