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Category: Institutions

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

Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 1)

Buckle up everyone.  COU just did what universities have been telling everyone for years was impossible: publishing actual useful admin data on faculty workloads and sessionals from every university in Ontario bar the University of Toronto (speculate away as to why this is: the footnotes imply it’s because it couldn’t put together the data together properly). It’s all right here.  Read it.  It’s the best data ever put together on Canadian faculty. Oddly enough, COU published this yesterday with no fanfare

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January 23, 2018 5 Comments

Canada’s Secret Weapon against Inequality

Inequality is perhaps the great political issue of the 21st century (so far anyway).  And while Canada isn’t exactly a world-beater on this score, we do show up a heck of a lot better than some of our peers – say in the UK, France or certainly the US.  Despite lots of great work by people like Miles Corak, there’s no real agreement as to why this is: is it more robust social programs?  A more powerful union movement?  Our immigration

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January 22, 2018 2 Comments

College Revenues versus University Revenues

As you all know, I spend a lot of time analyzing university finances, mainly because the data is easy to get and is quite detailed (Canadian higher education statistics are disastrous in many ways, but one area where our stats are better than almost anywhere else in the world is our institutional financial reporting – the FIUC Survey is genuinely world-class).   But I normally don’t spend the same amount of time on community college, which is something I’d like to change starting

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January 18, 2018 1 Comment

UBC Strategic Plan

I don’t usually comment on under-development Strategic Plans, but I’m going to make an exception for the University of British Columbia because they’re doing something that is either going to be incredibly transformational or seriously catastrophic. Just a little bit of background.  The process (a full time-line and process notes are here) has been about as inclusive as you’re likely to see at a major university.  Which is to say, there have been a lot of test-the-water meetings but not necessarily

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January 16, 2018 2 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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