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Category: Funding and Finances

Africa: A Wrong Turn in Higher Ed Policy

One of the policy fads sweeping Africa right now is the idea that all teaching staff should possess PhDs.  It’s now policy in Nigeria, and a number of other countries.  I’m not sure where this policy priority came from, but it’s a terrible idea, diverting resources away from where they’re most needed at a time when the system is straining under the weight of ever-growing demand. “Wait a minute”, I hear you say.  “Who can be against having more qualified

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January 13, 2014 No Comments

The Salaries Problem

I’ve made a few key points over the last couple of days: 1)      Canadian Universities will be lucky if they keep being able to increase their incomes by 3% per year, holding enrolments constant. 2)      The kinds of salary settlements we have seen recently at Canadian universities, if allowed to continue, will eat up easily 70-80% of that income, maybe more, leaving precious little left over for IT, infrastructure, etc. 3)      It’s not a problem of administrative bloat.  The ratio of academic salaries

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January 9, 2014 8 Comments

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

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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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