It’s getting close to that time of year when I need to sign off for the holidays (tomorrow will be the last blog until January 4th).  So before then, I thought it would be worth quickly catching up on a few things.

Some reports you may have missed.  A number of reports have come out recently that I have been meaning to review.  Two, I think, are of passing note:

i) The Alberta Auditor-general devoted part of his annual report (see pages 21-28) to the subject of risk-management of cost-recovery and for-profit enterprises in the province’s post-secondary institutions, and concluded that the government really has no idea how much risk the provinces’ universities and colleges have taken on in the form of investments, partnerships, joint ventures, etc.  And that’s partly because the institutions themselves frequently don’t do a great job of quantifying this risk.  This issue’s a sleeper – my guess is it will increase in importance as time goes on.

ii) The Ontario auditor general reviewed the issue of University Intellectual Property (unaccountably, this story was overlooked by the media in favour of reporting on the trifling fact that Ontarians have overpaid for energy by $37 billion over the last – wait, what?  How much?).  It was fairly scathing about the province’s current activities in terms of ensuring the public gets value for money for its investments. A lot of the recommendations to universities consisted of fairly nitpicky stuff about documentation of commercialization, but there were solid recommendations on the need to track the impact of technology transfer, and in particular the socio-economic impact.  Again, I suspect similar issues will crop up with increasing frequency for both governments and institutions across the country.

Higher Ed Books of the Year.  For best book, I’m going to go with Lauren Rivera’s Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, which I reviewed back here.   I’ll give a runner-up to Kevin Carey’s The End of College, about which I wrote a three-part review in March (here, here, and here).  I think the thesis is wrong, and as others have pointed out there are some perspectives missing here, but it put a lot of valuable issues about the future of higher education on the table in a clear and accessible way.

Worst book?  I’m reluctantly having to nominate Mark Ferrara’s Palace of Ashes: China and the Decline of American Higher Education.  I say reluctantly because the two chapters on the development of Chinese higher education is pretty good.  But the thesis as a whole is an utter train wreck.  Basically it amounts to: China is amazing because it is spending more money on higher education, and the US is terrible because it is spending less money on higher education (though he never bothers to actually check how much each is spending, say, as a proportion of GDP, which is a shame, as he would quickly see that US expenditure remains way above China’s even after adjusting for the difference in GDP).  The most hilarious bits are the ones where he talks about the erosion of academic freedom due to budget cuts, whereas in China… (you see the problem?  The author unfortunately doesn’t).  Dreck.

CUDO: You may recall I had some harsh things to say about the stuff that Common University Dataset Ontario was releasing on class sizes.  I offered a right of reply, and COU has kindly provided one, which I reproduce below, unedited:

We have looked into the anomalies that you reported in your blog concerning data in CUDO on class size.  Almost all data elements in CUDO derive from third party sources (for example, audited enrolment data reported to MTCU, NSSE survey responses) or from well-established processes that include data verification (for example, faculty data from the National Faculty Data Pool), and provide accurate and comparable data across universities. The class size data element in CUDO is an exception, however, where data is reported by universities and not validated across universities. We have determined that, over time, COU members have developed inconsistent approaches to reporting of the class size data in CUDO.

 COU will be working with universities towards more consistent reporting of class size for the next release of CUDO.

With respect to data concerning faculty workload:  COU published results of a study of faculty work in August 2014,  based on data collected concerning work performed by full-time tenured faculty, using data from 2010 to 2012. We recognize the need for further data concerning teaching done by contract teaching staff. As promised in the 2014 report, COU is in the process of updating the analysis based on 2014-15 data, and is expanding the data collection to include all teaching done in universities by both full-time tenured/tenure track faculty and contract teaching staff. We expect to release results of this study in 2016.

Buonissimo.  ‘Til tomorrow.