The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Universities

A Closer Look at Gender Pay Gaps

Picking up on yesterday’s blog, let’s look more closely at the data on university gender and pay. In particular, we need to look at the underlying factors that cause pay disparities. Years of service is the most obvious single factor affecting average pay. Figure 1 shows the women’s share of the professoriate, by age.  Overall, 41% of the professoriate are women, but it skews much higher among younger (less well-paid) professors and much lower among older (more highly-paid) ones.  Figure 1:

Read More »
February 6, 2020 No Comments

More Fun with Faculty Salary Data

Morning all.  Yesterday I promised you more faculty data analysis, and I am going to start by looking at variation in pay by institution.  I’m going to be deliberately provocative by showing people the distribution of salaries at the level where they vary the most: full professorships.  Ready? Figure 1: Average Salaries of Full Professors by Institution (and yes, the X-axis is unreadable, do you know how many institutions there are in this country?), Canada, 2018-19 The point I want to underline

Read More »
February 5, 2020 2 Comments

Strategic Planning for Ambiguous Organizations

I have been doing a fair bit of strategic planning work recently and one mantra that people like repeating when it comes this kind of exercise is “we’re not like a business, so we can’t plan like a business”.  I get why people say this, but they’re wrong.  Or rather, they’re right, but not for the reasons they think. When people say that “universities aren’t businesses”, mostly what they are thinking is that universities aren’t interested in profit, per se.  But

Read More »
November 25, 2019 2 Comments

The Making of the Modern University

I have spent a godawful amount of time on planes this week, going to Malawi and back for a meeting concerning the African Centres of Excellence project.  It’s given me a lot of time to catch up on reading (two recommendations for African fiction: The Grub Hunter by Amir Tag Elser is good, but Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto is great).  But one book in particular I thought I should mention to y’all is The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the

Read More »
November 22, 2019 1 Comment

Superstar Theory and Why Higher Education is Different

I spent part of this weekend reading Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life, by the late Princeton Economist Alan Krueger (whose work on higher education I highlighted here when he died by suicide earlier this year).  It’s not a bad little book, part inside-baseball on the music industry, part using examples from the music industry to explain certain features of the wider economy.  But one chapter in particular got me thinking

Read More »
November 4, 2019 1 Comment
Load More

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...