I’m on my way to Moscow today. It’s become one of my favourite destinations not only because I can walk around and pretend I am in my favourite novels (I highly recommend an early morning stroll to the Patriarch Ponds and then sit on one of the benches to read the opening chapter of The Master and Margarita) but also because Russia in general holds a mirror up to the west and makes you question the “normal” order of things.
Over the past couple of decades, countries have designed policies to improve their research universities and make them more “world-class”, largely on the assumption that this will pay some kind of economic dividend. A lot of these policies involved what became known as “excellence initiatives” – projects that concentrated spending on a restricted number of institutions with the idea that these extra resources would propel these universities into some kind of global elite. This raises the question: do they work?
We all know that Japan is a technological leader, right? An “innovation nation”? And we all know innovation comes from universities, right? So Japanese universities must be kind of god-like in their innovation abilities, right? Right? Well, no, not exactly. Or not the way Canadian universities think about the term, anyway. And understanding why this is the case is a helpful way to think about the poverty of Canada’s own innovation thinking. So, let’s start by looking at Gross Expenditures
About a month ago, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put out a report on precarious employment in Ontario universities and colleges. One good thing about this document at the outset: it has an imaginative research design. There is so much we do not know, and in the absence of any detailed reporting by institutions themselves cannot know about employment in post-secondary institutions. To get around this, the report’s authors, Erika Shaker and Robin Shaban, gather data from the Labour Force Survey,
“…Mr. Speaker, we know that living standards depend on productivity, productivity depends on innovation, and innovation depends on skills, technology, and competition. So we are going to ramp up on all of them. This won’t be easy. It won’t be quick. We are not doing this with an eye to the next election; it’s a marathon not a sprint. But we have to start somewhere. Skills Let’s start with skills. While recognizing that having a skilled labour force is a
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.
