Category: Universities

Canadian University Finances 2016-17 (Income)

So, the 2016-2017 Financial Information of Universities and Colleges came out in July, and as usual I’ve got some highlights for you. This year, we’ll be doing this as a two-parter, one on income (today) and one on expenditure (tomorrow). For those of you looking for data on community college expenditures, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a few months – Statscan typically doesn’t release that data until December (but rest assured I will cover it when the time comes).

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Management (or Lack Thereof)

[the_ad id=”12740″] There are steady complains about over-management or micro-management in universities.  And, sometimes, there’s a lot of truth to the complaints.  But I argue that in North America, there’s a pretty good case that universities are under-managed, and that an awful lot of the sector’s problems can be traced to under-management. When it comes to management, North American universities are quite different than, say, Australian and UK ones.  To over-generalize only a little bit, we only manage the institutions;

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Post-Soviet Higher Education

As loyal readers know, I am a big believer that Soviet Higher Education teaches some real eternal truths about our sector (see here and here in particular).  This week I’ve been reading a book of essays called 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity edited by Jeroen Huisman, Anna Smolentseva and Isak Froumin.  And although structurally it’s a bit repetitive (as any book containing 15 identically-structured essays is likely to be), it’s very much worth a read

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A Taxonomy of Private Universities

When people hear the words “private higher education”, most North Americans’ imaginations immediately jump to one of two mental images: prestigious Ivy League universities, or predatory chains of private colleges like ITT Technical Institutes or Corinthian Colleges or something like that.  But private higher education globally is actually more varied than this.  Let’s take a quick tour. Prestigious Private Non-Profits.  These are your Harvards, your Stanfords, your MITs.  Outside the United States, these are pretty rare: Japan has a few (Waseda, Keio), and there

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More York

[the_ad id=”12709″] Judging by most of my mail bag, yesterday’s piece on the York strike was a hit.  So, I thought I would throw in two tidbits which I didn’t really get to yesterday, as well as give my suggestion for a way out of the strike. Tidbit 1:  For those of you who don’t know the geography of York: it’s massive.  The main Keele campus is over 450 acres.  But, in a terrible for management/great for labour act of

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