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Category: Institutions

The Economics of Interdisciplinary Programs at Small Universities

A minor kerfuffle blew up yesterday in Sackville when the coordinator of Mount Allison University’s Women’s and Gender Studies announced that, due to budget cuts, she had been informed that the university would no longer be offering classes in this program, as of next fall.  Cue petitions, angry students, a buzzfeed listicle, etc. What follows here is a little explainer with respect to the economics of this situation: Mount Allison is a small school.  Enrolment last year was 2,369, which was down

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February 3, 2016 2 Comments

Questions and Answers about UBC

So, what happened last week?  On Monday, pursuant to a freedom-of-information request submitted last fall, UBC finally released documents – mainly emails – related to the events surrounding the departure of Arvind Gupta.  Much of it was redacted, including a flurry of fairly long exchanges that happened in May and June.  On Wednesday, somebody figured out how to un-redact the document in adobe, and all of a sudden everyone could see the crucial exchanges.  Then on Thursday, in view of the fact that

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February 1, 2016 6 Comments

The Future of Work (and What it Means for Higher Education), Part 2

Yesterday we looked at a few of the hypotheses out there about how IT is destroying jobs (particularly: good jobs).  Today we look at how institutions should react to these changes. If I were running an institution, here’s what I’d do: First, I’d ask every faculty to come up with a “jobs of the future report”.  This isn’t the kind of analysis that makes sense to do at an institutional level: trends are going to differ from one part of the

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January 28, 2016 5 Comments

One In, One Out

I had a discussion a few months ago with a government official who was convinced she knew what was wrong with universities.  “They have no discipline,” she said.  “They just go out and create new programs all the time with no thought as to what the cost implications are or what the labour market implications are, and so costs just keep going up and up.” I told her she was only half right.  It’s absolutely true that universities have no discipline when it

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January 25, 2016 6 Comments

Marginal Costs, Marginal Revenue

Businesses have a pretty good way of knowing when to offer more or less of a good.  It’s encapsulated in the equation MC = MR, and shown in the graphic below.                 Briefly, in the production of any good, unit-costs fall to start with as the benefits of economies of scale start to rise.  Eventually, however, if production is expanded far enough you get diseconomies of scale, and the marginal cost begins to rise.  Where the

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January 21, 2016 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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