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Category: Funding and Finances

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

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

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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