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Category: Worldwide PSE

U.K. Tuition Fees: Early Results Are In

Unless you’ve been in a cave for the last 18 months, you’ve probably heard that the U.K. government is overhauling policies on student fees and government support in England and Wales (Scotland has its own arrangements). Public support for arts and social science students was eliminated, institutional grants were cut by 41% and, most strikingly, the limit on tuition fees was raised from £3,350/year to £9,000/year. Since announcing the broad outlines of the policy fifteen months ago, the Cameron government

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January 31, 2012 2 Comments

Distinct Missions

Why are Canadian universities so scared of acting differently from one another?  Why does no one want a niche? I’m not just talking about their cookie-cutter mission statements here, which seem to involve adding the words “research” and “excellence” to the output of a random word generator. I’m talking about the cookie-cutter ways they go about their daily business. In marketing-speak: they have little or no brand personality. It’s not as though cool niche missions are that hard to dream

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January 25, 2012 No Comments

Cult Militias in the Quad

For those student affairs professionals among you who think you have it bad, consider the state of universities in Nigeria. Prior to independence, future Nobel prize-winner Wole Soyinka and some friends started an anti-colonial political confraternity known as the “Pyrates” at University College, Ibadan. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, confraternities began to spread rapidly, adopting names like the “Black Axes,” the “Supreme Vikings” and (I’m not making this up) the “Klansmen Konfraternity.” Female counterparts also emerged, like the

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January 24, 2012 1 Comment

Even More Salary Comparisons

– Updated: 8:50 a.m. Anybody want to keep going on this comparison business? It gets tougher as you move further away from Canada and the North American systems of Academic rank, but why not? Let’s start with the U.K. Data on salaries is published annually in the Times Higher Education Supplement, which divides the data into two categories: “professors” and “not professors.” The first term is basically analogous to our “full professors” (though we bestow that rank on a third

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January 12, 2012 4 Comments

Comparative Salary Data – Canada vs. U.S.

Yesterday, we looked at trends in Canadian faculty salary data. But how does our compensation stack up again the United States? Here, I take 2009-10 U.S. salary data for professors at four-year institutions from the AAUP’s Report on the Status of the Academic Profession. For Canada, I use the same data as yesterday but add professors in medical fields. I do not adjust for currency since the dollar is roughly at par. The comparison looks like this: Canada vs. U.S.

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January 11, 2012 1 Comment

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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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