Category: Funding and Finances

A (Not Very Good) Sign of Things to Come

So, Dalton McGuinty has released the Ontario Liberal Party’s platform and its associated costing document. What’s drawn everyone’s attention so far is this idea of “30% tuition rebates” – understandably so since the cost of the this one is almost a third of all new proposed spending (the miserly sums are a nod towards the fact that the province is essentially broke and can’t afford any new spending).  I’ll go into more depth about these rebates tomorrow in my Globe blog, globecampus.tumblr.com; suffice for the

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Strategy Matters

Here’s a key truth to understanding the future of academia: the western world hit “Peak Higher Education” sometime in 2009. That is to say, across the OECD, we are unlikely to see public funding at 2009 levels ever again. Between the current global financial crisis and its associated fiscal problems, and the challenges associated with aging societies, there will not be a return to prior levels of public support for higher education for decades to come. Now peak higher education

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Data Point of the Week: Comparing Academic Salaries

If there’s one subject we write about that gets people riled up, it’s academic salaries in Canada and the U.S. It’s a complicated issue – so let’s look at concrete examples at three of the better-paying Canadian institutions (Trent, Calgary and McMaster) and three prestigious American universities (Dartmouth, Washington and Berkeley). If you just look at baseline salaries for two sets of institutions, you see some pretty big differences as shown in Figure 1, below. The gap is bigger for

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