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Tag: Budget Cuts

Why Class Size Matters (Up to a Point)

At the outset of the MOOC debate about four years ago, there was a line of argument that went something like this: MOOC Enthusiast:  These MOOCs are great.  Now the classroom is not a barrier.  Now we can teach hundreds of thousands of students at a time!  Quel efficiency! Not MOOC Enthusiast:  They’re just videos.  They can’t give you the same human touch as an in-class experience with a professor. MOOC Enthusiast: How’s that human touch going for you in the 1,000-person intro class? To which there was

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January 11, 2016 6 Comments

Are Japanese Humanities Faculties Really Being Shut Down?

You may have noticed stories in the press recently about the government of Japan asking national universities to shut down their humanities faculties.  Such stories have appeared in the Times Higher Ed, Time, and Bloomberg.  Most of these stories have been accompanied by commentary about how shortsighted this is: don’t the Japanese know that life is complex, and that we need humanities for synthesis, etc.?  A lot of these stories are also tinged with a hint of early-1990s “these uncultured

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September 28, 2015 2 Comments

Students Won’t Save Us This Time

 I do a fair bit of barnstorming around Canada giving talks on higher education finance.  My audiences, by and large, split into two groups: those that remember the cuts of the late 90s and those that don’t.  The ones who don’t remember them are mostly OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD about future funding challenges (especially when I show them that – contrary to their belief – that operating income has actually been going up sharply recently).  The ones who do remember are more perplexed:

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April 14, 2015 No Comments

Classroom Economics (The End)

So we spent Monday looking at the economic basics of classroom and teaching loads, and Tuesday looking at how difficult it is to improve the situation by increases in tuition or government grants.  Wednesday we saw that reducing average academic compensation (presumably via increasing the proportion of credits taught by adjuncts) can be quite effective in reducing teaching loads, while on Thursday we saw how trying to achieve a similar effect through attacking costs other than academic compensation would require enormously painful – and probably

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January 23, 2015 2 Comments

Classroom Economics (Part 4)

Yesterday we looked at ways to get the teaching budget down.  Today, we’re going to look at the other half of the cost equation: all that overhead.  And we’re going to look at it by asking the question: how big a cut in overhead would it take to equal the effect of replacing 20% of your credit hours with sessionals (which, as we saw yesterday, reduces overall teaching loads by 17%)? Recall the equation: X = aϒ/(b+c), where “X” is the

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January 22, 2015 No 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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