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Category: Funding and Finances

When Should McGill Go Private?

With the election of a PQ government which is unwilling to sanction tuition fee increases and too broke to actually spend any more money on PSE, there’s one debate which is sure to arise soon: when and under what conditions should McGill leave the public sector and go it alone as a private university? In a sense, of course, McGill has always been private. It was not founded by an act of the legislature, but rather as a charitable enterprise

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October 10, 2012 1 Comment

Straight Thinking about International Education (1)

Over the past summer, we at HESA have been thinking a lot about international enrolment, and speaking to international student recruiters and advisers, and international students themselves. You’ll get to see some of the results of this in the coming months as we publish some of this research, but I wanted to share a couple of thoughts with you all now, while the federal task force report is still fresh in everyone’s minds. My main thought is this: we’re not ready to

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October 1, 2012 2 Comments

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

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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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