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Category: Universities

The Canadian Professoriate: The Long View

Recently, I noticed that Statistics Canada has data on the Canadian professoriate dating back to 1970-71.  I don’t know if this is a recent addition to the free data scheme or if it’s been there all along and I have never noticed it, but it’s certainly worth a peek. Figure 1 is the simple picture, just total numbers.  It’s a pretty simple story: long-term, Canadian higher education has expanded by about 460 full-time academics per year every year since 1970. 

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January 12, 2022 1 Comment

Faculty Salary Data, 2020-21

We haven’t looked at faculty salaries in awhile, so let’s do that. Getting a handle on recent faculty salary data is easy: it’s the one thing that Statscan does both rapidly and well in the higher education field.  It may take them 30 months to produce student enrolment data, and they collect no data at all about college tuition or non-academic staff, but by gum they can process university salary data in under 12 months! (Yes, this does tell you

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January 11, 2022 1 Comment

No Competition

Lately, I’ve been wondering whether we have reached some kind of dead-end in the history of universities.  Specifically, whether because of a combination of increasing regulatory control, professional conformity and institutional mission creep, we have got to a point where it has actually become impossible to imagine alternatives to the modern research university as a way of organizing post-18 education. If you look back at the history of universities, you see periodic reinventions of the form.  There was the original

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December 8, 2021 2 Comments

Smash the Calendar

The north side of Edmonton’s downtown is maybe the most amazing couple of square miles in Canadian post-secondary education.  You’ve got Norquest College (15,000 students) on 102nd.  There’s MacEwan University (another 15,000) between 104th and 105th, and then starting around 115th you’ve got the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), which adds another 20,000 students or so.  That’s a lot of teaching and learning. So why isn’t it better known?  I’d say the concentration doesn’t get the love/notice it should because there

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December 7, 2021 5 Comments

Waiting for the Arbitrator

We are now on Day 23 of a strike at the University of Manitoba, where the two sides genuinely did not start all that far apart.  Binding arbitration looms.  How did it get to this point? To really understand what’s going on here, one must go back to 2016.  In that year, the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) went on strike over a combination of governance and salary issues.  They ended up winning a good chunk of what they

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November 24, 2021 No 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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