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Category: Institutions

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

A Closer Look at Gender Pay Gaps

Picking up on yesterday’s blog, let’s look more closely at the data on university gender and pay. In particular, we need to look at the underlying factors that cause pay disparities. Years of service is the most obvious single factor affecting average pay. Figure 1 shows the women’s share of the professoriate, by age.  Overall, 41% of the professoriate are women, but it skews much higher among younger (less well-paid) professors and much lower among older (more highly-paid) ones.  Figure 1:

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February 6, 2020 No Comments

More Fun with Faculty Salary Data

Morning all.  Yesterday I promised you more faculty data analysis, and I am going to start by looking at variation in pay by institution.  I’m going to be deliberately provocative by showing people the distribution of salaries at the level where they vary the most: full professorships.  Ready? Figure 1: Average Salaries of Full Professors by Institution (and yes, the X-axis is unreadable, do you know how many institutions there are in this country?), Canada, 2018-19 The point I want to underline

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February 5, 2020 2 Comments

Questions About Alberta Data

I’m heading to Alberta for a couple of days this week, so I’ve been looking more carefully at some of what’s going on there, particularly following the MacKinnon Report on government financing.  And frankly, I’m a little perplexed at what I am seeing. Just to be clear, the Albertan government is currently on a kick to balance the budget after several years of deficits.  Nothing wrong with that.  Higher education is one of the areas they have decided is among those they

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January 20, 2020 5 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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