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Category: Universities

Comparing Per-Student University Expenditures by Category (2)

This is part 2 of a two-parter on how Canadian universities spend their money.  All the stuff about what data I’m using, caveats thereto, etc., are available in yesterday’s post.  If you missed yesterday, go catch up here. First, two small mea culpas from yesterday.  First, due to a cut/paste error, part of the data on student services that went out yesterday was slightly off, but has now been corrected on the website.  Second, I neglected to mention that the

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April 27, 2016 1 Comment

Comparing Per-Student University Expenditures by Category (1)

Just for giggles the other day, I took a look at Canadian university expenditures in 2013-14 using (as usual) the CAUBO/Statscan Financial Information of Universities and Colleges Survey.  I looked at operating expenditures by category.  Then I normalized them per FTE student.  And I got some very weird results which I thought I would share with y’all. What I am going to do in this series is show you the results for the main categories of expenditure which are “non-academic”. 

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April 26, 2016 4 Comments

Innovation to Watch at the University of Sydney

Australian universities seem to do “Big Change” a lot better than universities elsewhere.  A few years ago, the University of Melbourne radically overhauled its entire curriculum in the space of about two years partly to create a more North American-like distinction between undergraduate and professional degrees and partly to reduce degree clutter by winnowing the number of different degrees from over a hundred to just six.  (For a refresher, I wrote about this back here). If you read press reports about

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April 7, 2016 4 Comments

“Slow Professors”

I read with interest this piece in University Affairs about “The Slow Professor”, which is the name of a book by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber – English professors from Brock and Queen’s, respectively – who think that professors need to push back against the hecticness of the modern academy.  To wit: “The authors offer insights on how to manage teaching, research and collegiality in an era when more professors feel ‘beleaguered, managed, frantic, stressed and demoralized’ as they juggle the increasingly

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April 1, 2016 1 Comment

Metaphors and Similes

I recently came across this little blogpost from the UK bemoaning the fact that the Vice-Chancellor of Imperial College described professors as “like small business owners”.  The poster then went on to wonder: “if professors are small businesses, what kind of micro-state is the contemporary university?” Interesting question.  The thing is, on our side of the pond at least, the idea that a university is something less than the sum of its parts has been pretty common for awhile now.  It

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March 28, 2016 1 Comment
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