(If you’re just tuning in today, you may want to catch up on Part 1 and Part 2) Back to our equation: X = aϒ/(b+c), where “X” is the total number of credit hours a professor must teach each year (a credit hour here meaning one student sitting in one course for one term), “ϒ” is average compensation per professor, “a” is the overhead required to support each professor, “b” is the government grant per student credit hour, and “c” is
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the commodities “supercycle” coming to an end. The most immediate evidence for this is what’s happening with the price of oil, which is falling rapidly (the spot price is down 27% in the last 4 months, but more importantly the 5-year futures price is down 24% ). That’s both because of weaker global demand and because there’s a lot more oil out there than there used to be, thanks to (among other
Further to Tuesday’s blog about STEM panics, I note a new report out from Canada 2020, a young-ish organization with pretensions to be the Liberals’ pet think tank called Skills and Higher Education in Canada: Towards Excellence and Equity. Authored by the Conference Board’s Daniel Munro, it covers most of the ground you’d expect in a “touch-all-the-bases” report. And while the section on equity is pretty good, when it comes to “excellence” this paper – like many before it – draws
Holiday time means that you’re probably looking for gifts. If you’re in the market for books related to higher education, I’ve got two recommendations for you. The first is, The University: An Illustrated History. It’s a coffee-table book, too unwieldy even for reading in bed, let alone on an airplane. But who cares? It’s as good a single-volume history of higher learning as has ever been written; it’s admirably global in scope, and it does a very nice job of balancing the institution’s
Recently I was asked about what I thought the big upcoming challenges – beyond the regular budget stuff – were for universities and colleges. From the shortest-term to the longest-term, my answer was: Not Getting Ahead of the Metrics Game. A perennial topic, but no less important for that. In every recession, governments re-double their efforts to manage the system through metrics. The odds are very strong that government-designed metrics are going to be goofy in the extreme (anyone remember
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