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Category: Universities

The Evolution of Institutional Government Relations

I was speaking yesterday at the Government Relations Officers Conference in Banff, and it got me thinking about how the field has changed over the last 20 years. I started in government relations back in 1996, working for the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) – now “Universities Canada”.  Back then, most medium-to-large institutions had government relations officers, but not government relations offices.  There would be one person, maybe with an assistant.  Their role was essentially to act as

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May 5, 2015 1 Comment

McGill vs. UBC

In eastern parts of the country, if you use the words “the three best universities in Canada”, they look at you slightly oddly.  They know you mean U of T and McGill, but they’re not 100% sure who the third one is.  “UBC?” they ask, uncertainly. This is pure eastern myopia.  Today, I will advance the proposition that by most measures, UBC is substantially ahead of McGill, and is in fact the country’s #2 university. Let’s start with some statistics

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April 27, 2015 4 Comments

More Inter-Provincial Finance Comparisons

Yesterday we compared provinces on PSE spending as a percentage of GDP – that is, as a percentage of their ability to pay.  More or less, what we found was that most provinces were pretty similar, at 2.5% of GDP, with Saskatchewan a bit lower, Alberta a lot lower, and Nova Scotia and PEI much higher.  But provinces have different economic capabilities and different student participation rates.  So how do all these different expenditure patterns play out where it counts, in dollars

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April 2, 2015 4 Comments

Some Inter-Provincial Finance Comparisons

Last week, I blogged about how OECD figures showed Canada had the highest level of PSE spending in the world, at 2.8% of GDP.  Many of you wrote to me asking: i) if the picture was the same when we looked at other measures, like per-capita spending or spending per-student; and, ii) could I break things down by province, instead of nationally.  I am ever your servant, so I tried working on this. I quickly came up against a problem,

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April 1, 2015 1 Comment

Budget Denialism

You’ve heard of climate change denialism?  The use of spurious, crap data to try to undermine public acceptance of the well-established phenomenon of climate change?  Well, there’s something sweeping Canadian campuses that’s very similar.  I call it budget denialism.  Let me show you some examples from two universities in particular: Dalhousie and Wilfrid Laurier. The Dal budget is here.  The focus of complaints at Dalhousie has been the $5.6 million cut to “faculties”.  Now, when you hear the word “faculties”,

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March 25, 2015 5 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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