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Category: Institutions

What’s Going On With College Graduates in Ontario?

I see that Ken Coates and Bill Morrison have just written a new book  called Dream Factories: Why Universities Won’t Solve The Youth Jobs Crisis.  I haven’t read it yet, but judging by the title I’d assume that it makes pretty much the same argument Coates made back in this 2015 paper  for the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which in effect was “fewer university students, more tradespeople!” (my critique of this paper is here) With the fall in commodity prices, it’s

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May 2, 2016 No Comments

Comparing Per-Student University Expenditures by Category (2)

This is part 2 of a two-parter on how Canadian universities spend their money.  All the stuff about what data I’m using, caveats thereto, etc., are available in yesterday’s post.  If you missed yesterday, go catch up here. First, two small mea culpas from yesterday.  First, due to a cut/paste error, part of the data on student services that went out yesterday was slightly off, but has now been corrected on the website.  Second, I neglected to mention that the

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April 27, 2016 1 Comment

Comparing Per-Student University Expenditures by Category (1)

Just for giggles the other day, I took a look at Canadian university expenditures in 2013-14 using (as usual) the CAUBO/Statscan Financial Information of Universities and Colleges Survey.  I looked at operating expenditures by category.  Then I normalized them per FTE student.  And I got some very weird results which I thought I would share with y’all. What I am going to do in this series is show you the results for the main categories of expenditure which are “non-academic”. 

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April 26, 2016 4 Comments

Who Should Sit on Boards of Governors?

Western Canada seems to be ground zero for talking about Board composition these days.  Take, for example, folks at UBC getting upset that government appointments to the Board of Governors lack a certain diversity (i.e. they all come either from old Vancouver money or the tech sector).  The Government of Alberta has decided to not automatically re-appoint any Board members whose terms are up for renewal (this actually is not something specific to universities – it’s part of a more general effort of

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April 25, 2016 1 Comment

Innovation to Watch at the University of Sydney

Australian universities seem to do “Big Change” a lot better than universities elsewhere.  A few years ago, the University of Melbourne radically overhauled its entire curriculum in the space of about two years partly to create a more North American-like distinction between undergraduate and professional degrees and partly to reduce degree clutter by winnowing the number of different degrees from over a hundred to just six.  (For a refresher, I wrote about this back here). If you read press reports about

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April 7, 2016 4 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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