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Category: Universities

Funding Polytechnics v. Funding Universities

Recently, a colleague asked me how big I thought the gap in funding was between polytechnics and universities.  My hunch was that universities were certainly better funded if you include all sources of income, but that if you just looked at core provincial government funding, the gap might not be so large.  So, for giggles, I decided to try to compare the two. Due to the complexity of various funding mechanisms and – especially – the difference in the nature

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February 7, 2018 1 Comment

A More Nuanced Look at Graduate Incomes

It’s all-Council-of-Ontario-Universities this week on the blog, but that’s because they’re the ones putting out the great data.  Today, it’s the annual survey on graduate outcomes which looks at how bachelor’s degree graduates are faring in the labour market.  Standard caveat: Ontario =/= Canada, but it produces nearly half the country’s bachelor degrees so it’s bound to be close to the national average and the trends you see here are unlikely to be much different that those you see anywhere else. Figure 1 shows

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January 25, 2018 No Comments

Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 2)

Today I want to go back to that COU report on academic staff I described yesterday (mind-blowing because of how much previously unavailable data it provided) and pick up on the other set of issues it raised: namely, the status of part-time and non-tenure track staff (ie. sessionals). The data is not perfect, but it is by several orders of magnitude the best thing ever published on the subject.  So here goes. The report makes a distinction between tenure stream

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January 24, 2018 2 Comments

Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 1)

Buckle up everyone.  COU just did what universities have been telling everyone for years was impossible: publishing actual useful admin data on faculty workloads and sessionals from every university in Ontario bar the University of Toronto (speculate away as to why this is: the footnotes imply it’s because it couldn’t put together the data together properly). It’s all right here.  Read it.  It’s the best data ever put together on Canadian faculty. Oddly enough, COU published this yesterday with no fanfare

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January 23, 2018 5 Comments

UBC Strategic Plan

I don’t usually comment on under-development Strategic Plans, but I’m going to make an exception for the University of British Columbia because they’re doing something that is either going to be incredibly transformational or seriously catastrophic. Just a little bit of background.  The process (a full time-line and process notes are here) has been about as inclusive as you’re likely to see at a major university.  Which is to say, there have been a lot of test-the-water meetings but not necessarily

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January 16, 2018 2 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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