Category: Universities

Laurentian Blues (2)

I want to go into more detail on Laurentian, digging into finances, and correcting one or two things I got wrong yesterday. An unfortunate amount of time is going to be spent dragging Laurentian for bad data practices, but that can’t be helped. Let’s go back to this graph I showed yesterday. With a little bit more digging, I see that Laurentian claims that there were about $8 million in outstanding deficits prior to 2012-13, and that they are claiming

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Laurentian Blues (1)

Laurentian University will run out of cash at the end of February.  That’s the most important – but far from only – take-away of the Monitor’s Report filed Monday in an Ontario court as Laurentian University filed for creditor protection. People are throwing around words like “unprecedented” to describe what is happening at Laurentian.  I’m always careful about that because before WWII a lot of wild things happened in Canadian universities (the Honorary Bursar making off with the entire University

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Some Surprising Applications Data

Canada, as I think everyone is, on the whole, in the main, crap at educational data.  When it comes to getting up-to-the-minute data on things like enrolments and applications, we’re mostly hopeless, because everyone does their own thing and nobody bothers to make their data public or comparable until Statscan comes along 28 or months or so after the fact.  There are only two major exceptions to this: the Atlantic Association of Universities, which puts out a super-speedy enrolment check

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What’s in a Name?

When he was about ten, Cost Centre #1 (the boy, not the girl) started getting interested in US college football.  It occurred to him that maybe he and I had some “common ground”, since I was working a fair bit on rankings at the time.  Every Saturday morning, whenever the chyron threw up a new matchup, he’d yell “hey dad: Mississippi State, is that a good school?”  “hey, dad, what about Auburn?”, etc.  He had little interest in my explanations

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