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Category: Institutions

One More Thought on Administrative Bloat

One of the great things about Twitter is the quick feedback about things.  And last Wednesday, when I posted the graph below, people started banging on right away, saying “Yeah! Right on!  Administrative Bloat!” Figure 1: Percentage Growth in Academic vs. A&S Staff numbers, Self-Selected Institutions Which Actually Publish Staffing Data, 2010 to most recent year available             Nobody took me up on the offer about how to think about that graph in connection with what I had published the previous

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February 24, 2020 No Comments

New Enrolment Data. 2017-18. Finally.

Morning all.  There is finally enrolment data from October 2017 for the 2017-18 year.  Praise be StatsCan.  (Some of you think I am a bit hard on the people from Tunney’s Pasture.  Let’s be clear: much of the reason it takes StatsCan so long to put data together is because it takes institutions – particularly community colleges – a long time to compile and submit the data.  My understanding is that part of the reason this year’s release is a couple of years late

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February 20, 2020 No Comments

Administrative Bloat, 2020, Part II

After publishing yesterday’s piece, in which I updated a 5-year-old data analysis on spending on academic vs. non-academic salaries, I got a burst of unwarranted optimism and decided to try to do the same thing with another five year-old analysis on the same topic using institutional data – or at least institutional data from the dozen or so institutions who bother to publish this stuff.  Sounds simple, right?  I mean, if they published data before, they must publish it now, right?  How tough

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February 19, 2020 No Comments

Administrative Bloat, 2020 Edition

Let’s take a look at administrative bloat.  It’s been about four and a half years since we last did it: time for another look. Now, the typical story we hear about administrative bloat concerns the huge numbers of administrative and support staff (henceforth, “A&S Staff”) hired, in contrast to the ranks of the professoriate, which are constantly decimated by predatory managers and yadda yadda.  The second part of that is reasonably easy to de-bunk, as Statistics Canada actually publishes data

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February 18, 2020 2 Comments

Dual-Track Tuition

The University of Saskatchewan made the Times Higher Education last week when the UK weekly ran a story on the University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and its scheme to admit an extra 25 students per year, provided they pay the full cost of instruction, which is a shade over $60,000. This is about $50,000 more than what students admitted through the current intake process currently pay.  This is not about raising tuition for everyone: it’s about two-tier tuition. There’d be one rate for “top”

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February 11, 2020 3 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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