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Category: Universities

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

Field of Study (oh the humanities!)

This is part II of a blog on new enrolment data. I’ll be focussing on the universities data today because the change there is more dynamic.  (I know, I know, college peeps: I don’t pay enough attention to you.  I’ll try to make this up to you next week). So let’s look at the division of undergraduate enrolment for a second.  Figure 1 shows the split between fields of science.  The Big Six are Social Science & Law (20%), Business/Commerce/Administration

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January 10, 2018 5 Comments

A Canny Government Relations Strategy

[the_ad id=”11720″] Though it didn’t get a whole lot of ink/pixels, the Council of Ontario Universities launched a new lobbying campaign last week.  It’s called Partnering for a Better Future for Ontario and its focal point is a document of the same name – you can read the short version of the report here (yes, I know, only in academia could the short version of a lobbying report be 44 pages long).  In fact, it’s accompanied by a wide variety of supporting documents which

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December 7, 2017 No Comments

The Cost of an Aging Professoriate

You may have read recently about how Canada is really sticking it to junior researchers.  Dalhousie’s Julia Wright recently wrote about Canada haemorrhaging early-career research capacity and she has a point – just in the last seven years, the proportion of Canadian faculty aged 40 or less has fallen by a third, from roughly 22% to just over 15%. The question, of course, is “why”?  Some – including Wright – just blame a “shrinking academic labour market”, which tends to (either by

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December 6, 2017 7 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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