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Category: Universities

Canadian Higher Ed Exceptionalism, Part 1 (An Occasional Series)

For awhile now, I’ve been writing about other national systems of higher education in our, “Better Know a Higher Ed System” series, in part to throw Canada’s own policy system into sharp relief. But sometimes it’s better to look at some things a bit more directly, so today I want to start exploring some areas where Canada really is an exception, globally.  And there’s nowhere we stick out more than in the way we admit students to university. There are

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March 14, 2014 2 Comments

Could We Eliminate Sessionals if We Wanted To?

Last week, when I was writing about sessionals, I made the following statement: “Had pay levels stayed constant in real terms over the last 15 years, and the surplus gone into hiring, the need for sessionals in Arts & Science would be practically nil”. A number of you wrote to me, basically calling BS on my statement.  So I thought it would be worthwhile to show the math on this. In 2001-02, there were 28,643 profs without administrative duties in

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March 10, 2014 6 Comments

A More Productive Debate on “Differentiation”

One of the big topics over the past three years in Canada – and particularly in Ontario – has been that of “differentiation”.  The idea of differentiation as a boon to the university system essentially traces back to Adam Smith.  Just as in Smith’s hypothetical pin factory production can be increased multi-fold, by having different workers work on different aspects of pin-making, so too can a university system  be made more productive by having institutions concentrate on different aspects of

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February 26, 2014 6 Comments

The War on Small, Niche Public Universities

Governments love universities that make a niche for themselves.  “How delightful“, governments say.  “Oh, we’re so proud of you for not following the herd and trying to be just another big multi-versity.  You go, girl”. They say all of this, of course, until it comes time to actually fund them, at which point governments effectively flip small, niche universities the bird.  In practice, governments behave as though they hate small universities with a passion. There are two separate problems here.  The first has to do with the

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February 25, 2014 No Comments

Chinese Higher Education’s Take-Off

When Deng re-opened the universities, the system somehow managed to pull together a couple of hundred thousand professors, and around 600 institutions started enrolling students.  By 1980 that meant about a million students a year in mainstream universities (plus another half-million in specialized “adult higher education institutions”), and a cozy student: faculty ratio of about 4:1.  Over the next decade, to 1990, those numbers would increase to about 2 million in universities (mostly in 4-year undergraduate programs known as Benke), another million

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February 7, 2014 3 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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