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Category: Institutions

Less Nonsense about Technological Change, Please

University leaders have to put up with a lot of crap from politicians and business people.  There’s a lot of genuflecting to whatever the fads and feelings of the day are, just so they can appear “relevant” and “in tune”.  Superclusters? Oh yeah, superclusters are a great idea, Minister, really terrific, why has no one thought of them before?  When you are after public money, saying soothing things about the delusions of the powerful is just part of the game.

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February 9, 2018 2 Comments

Funding Polytechnics v. Funding Universities

Recently, a colleague asked me how big I thought the gap in funding was between polytechnics and universities.  My hunch was that universities were certainly better funded if you include all sources of income, but that if you just looked at core provincial government funding, the gap might not be so large.  So, for giggles, I decided to try to compare the two. Due to the complexity of various funding mechanisms and – especially – the difference in the nature

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February 7, 2018 1 Comment

How Many International Students is Too Many?

Everyone, it sometimes seems, wants more international students.  But is it possible to have too many international students?  And if so, when?  These days, it’s a delicate question: but where public dollars are at stake, it’s a question worth asking. There are three reasons why an institution might want to consider reining in the number of international students.  They are: Losing money. There are many good reasons why one might want to spend public money on non-citizens, but there are also

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February 2, 2018 3 Comments

A More Nuanced Look at Graduate Incomes

It’s all-Council-of-Ontario-Universities this week on the blog, but that’s because they’re the ones putting out the great data.  Today, it’s the annual survey on graduate outcomes which looks at how bachelor’s degree graduates are faring in the labour market.  Standard caveat: Ontario =/= Canada, but it produces nearly half the country’s bachelor degrees so it’s bound to be close to the national average and the trends you see here are unlikely to be much different that those you see anywhere else. Figure 1 shows

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January 25, 2018 No Comments

Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 2)

Today I want to go back to that COU report on academic staff I described yesterday (mind-blowing because of how much previously unavailable data it provided) and pick up on the other set of issues it raised: namely, the status of part-time and non-tenure track staff (ie. sessionals). The data is not perfect, but it is by several orders of magnitude the best thing ever published on the subject.  So here goes. The report makes a distinction between tenure stream

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January 24, 2018 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.

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