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Category: Funding and Finances

Prizes for Excellence

I wrote recently about using prizes as a way to distribute research money. More generally, though, prizes have a lot of potential as a way for governments to influence institutional behavior and create a more diverse higher education sector, and deserve to be given a lot more thought by policymakers. The reason for this is that we desperately need a more diverse set of incentives in our system. When politicians moan about how universities “aren’t responsive,” they are getting it precisely backwards;

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September 19, 2012 No Comments

Too Much Peer Review?

One way in which Canada stands out internationally in higher education is our ultra-reliance on individual peer review as a means of allocating research funding. While peer review is in many ways the “gold standard” of research assessment mechanisms, it has the drawback of being incredibly time-consuming, both for the applicant and for the assessors. What’s the alternative, though? Well, as Paula Stephan points out in her quite excellent book How Economics Shape Science, there are a number of ways that

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September 4, 2012 No Comments

Research Grants by Discipline

So, tomorrow, HESA will be releasing its inaugural set of Canadian research rankings. We think they’re pretty cool; not only are they the first attempt in Canada to employ field-normalization techniques on bibliometric data, as far as we’re aware, they’re the first rankings anywhere in the world to employ field-normalization on research income. Why does this matter? Well, not all research was created alike. Each discipline has a different publication culture, for starters. The average H-index score for an academic

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August 28, 2012 No Comments

Follies of the Rich and Philanthropic

One of the irritating things about modern capitalism is the way media and the establishment see the need to treat rich people’s ideas seriously, even if the subject at hand is something they know literally nothing about. Take, for instance, a recent story in Businessweek about Chamath Palihapitiya. A former Facebook insider, he’s now a venture capitalist with an eye for social entrepreneurship. The story has him creating a company called Brilliant, a “global online talent registry” that plans to identify

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August 27, 2012 No Comments

Basic Research Turns 67

Here’s an interesting little nugget: “basic research,” like the atomic bomb, was born in July 1945. The term did not exist until coined by Vannevar Bush for his work Science: the Endless Frontier, a roadmap for post-war American science policy commissioned by President Roosevelt. Prior to WWII, no distinction was made between “basic” and “applied” science; although some sciences were obviously more theoretical than others, it was widely recognized that science was always “applied,” at least to some degree. After

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August 13, 2012 2 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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