The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Institutions

It’s Not Just Demographics

The Council of Ontario Universities (COU) released an amusingly defensive press release last month, just after the high school applications deadline.  After a glancing acknowledgment that applications to university are down in the province for the second year in a row, we are earnestly told: DEMOGRAPHICS!  APPLICATIONS WAY UP IF YOU USE 2000 AS A BASE YEAR!  JOBS!  DEMOGRAPHICS!  MORE JOBS!  DID WE MENTION DEMOGRAPHICS? I guess COU views itself as a prophylactic against negative press coverage that secondary school applicants

Read More »
February 5, 2015 5 Comments

Why is CAUT Cheapening Academic Freedom?

Academic freedom is precious; it’s not something you want to mess with  – which is why it is such a mystery that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) permitted the Report of the Ad-hoc Investigatory Committee into the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba to be published. The back story, near as I can tell, is: for decades, the UManitoba Economics Department contained a fairly large squad of what are known as “heterodox” economists (i.e. political economy types who

Read More »
February 2, 2015 1 Comment

Classroom Economics (Part 4)

Yesterday we looked at ways to get the teaching budget down.  Today, we’re going to look at the other half of the cost equation: all that overhead.  And we’re going to look at it by asking the question: how big a cut in overhead would it take to equal the effect of replacing 20% of your credit hours with sessionals (which, as we saw yesterday, reduces overall teaching loads by 17%)? Recall the equation: X = aϒ/(b+c), where “X” is the

Read More »
January 22, 2015 No Comments

Classroom Economics (Part 3)

(If you’re just tuning in today, you may want to catch up on Part 1 and Part 2) Back to our equation: X = aϒ/(b+c), where “X” is the total number of credit hours a professor must teach each year (a credit hour here meaning one student sitting in one course for one term), “ϒ” is average compensation per professor, “a” is the overhead required to support each professor, “b” is the government grant per student credit hour, and “c” is

Read More »
January 21, 2015 9 Comments

Free Community College in Canada?

As Canadians, we have a tendency to pay an excess amount of attention to developments in the US.  For instance, people are already asking whether the Obama free community college model would work in Canada.  But this is actually two questions.  The first is whether or not someone could make community college free; the second question is whether that someone could be the federal government? Let’s take the second question first: could the federal government be the ones to do this in

Read More »
January 15, 2015 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...