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Category: Funding and Finances

Daycare Subsidies, Tuition Subsidies

I see the Globe is currently doing a series on affordable child care.  It’s a good series, but it’s striking how different the tone is from public discussions on higher education, despite the evident similarities between the two policy fields. This occurred to me a few months ago while reading a Globe op-ed from a new-ish parent, wondering why daycare was so unaffordable.  It was framed in the Globe’s very weird, class-politics manner, as: “My wife and I make $100,000 and we can’t afford daycare”. (Sidebar for non-Torontonians:

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October 25, 2013 No Comments

A Simple Solution for Statistics on Doctoral Education

Higher Education statistics in Canada are notoriously bad.  But if you think general stats on higher ed are hard to come by, try looking at our statistical systems with respect to doctoral education and its outcomes. Time-to-completion statistics are a joke.  Almost no one releases this data; when it is released, it often appears to be subject to significant “interpretation” (there’s a big difference between time-to-completion and “registered” time-to-completion.  If you want to keep the latter down, just tell students

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October 16, 2013 2 Comments

The Problem with Cutback Narratives

Let’s discuss how we talk about cutbacks.  And let’s talk about the University of Alberta. U of A has been rather radically affected by the recent cutbacks imposed by the Alberta government.  But here’s the weird thing: apparently it’s not enough to say “we’ve had cuts of 7%”in one year”.  Instead, people feel the need to enhance that figure in many ways.  It’s not just a 7% cut, they say – “we were told by government to budget based on

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October 15, 2013 3 Comments

Where Responsibility for Financial Sustainability Lies

I often write about the unsustainability of university finances, the lunacy of its cost base, the fact that Canadian profs are better paid than in any public system of higher education in the world, etc.  Some people have concluded from this that I am hostile to labour, or to academic unions in particular. But that’s not true.  Though I do call BS on some of the sanctimonious nonsense that comes out of academic unions on the beleaguered state of their

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October 8, 2013 19 Comments

The View from Vilnius

I spent an enjoyable couple of days in Lithuania last week, at a meeting of the EU’s Directors General of Higher Education.  I was there to talk about some research we at HESA (along with some colleagues from DZHW in Germany) are doing for the European Commission, assessing the impact of cost-sharing on institutions and students.  Unsurprisingly, at the margins of the conference (and occasionally within its proceedings), what really drove conversation were tales of austerity, and their effects on

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September 30, 2013 1 Comment

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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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