Tag: Budget Cuts

The Other Shoe Drops

So, the victorious Parti Québécois, who believe so much in education, who spent all spring and summer hand-wringing and moaning about how that mean, mean Jean Charest was just so… so mean because he wouldn’t invest in Quebec’s youth, and whose election was a massive and historic victory because they cancelled those terrible, evil, neo-liberal tuition fee hikes, has just cut subsidies to all universities’ and colleges’ by five percent. Oh, and the cuts aren’t coming next year, they’re coming this year. 

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Fall 2012: You’ve Been Warned

As we’re coming to the end of the school year, it’s worth looking ahead a bit to what we can expect next year.  You know, so you can obsess about it all summer before coming home. Public finances are only going to get worse.  Most provincial governments made their budget forecasts at a time when it looked like the US economy might be reaching take-off speed; that speed has now been firmly downgraded to “stall.” Throw in the non-negligible possibilities

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Those Statscan Cutbacks

Many will have seen news yesterday about large cutbacks in the works at Statistics Canada. On the basis of the news that lots of PSAC members had received notices that their jobs may be “affected,” a number of pro-Statscan commentators rushed to say that the agency needed to be saved because it provided such fantastic, non-partisan analysis. Well, yes. But yesterday’s notices appear not to have gone to any analysts, since they are not PSAC members.  The employees who got notices would

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America – the Exodus

As we watch our southern neighbours slide into seemingly perpetual budget crises and many state universities undergo some brutal austerity, it’s worth thinking about the American crises’ global impacts on higher education. Scientific talent is not distributed evenly around the world. If there’s one thing that the Shanghai rankings show, it’s how unbelievably deep the scientific talent pool is at American universities. But talent can move. Twice in the twentieth century, countries suffered major exoduses of scientific talent. In 1930s

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