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Tag: Enrolment

How Canadian Universities Got Both Big and Rich

Earlier this week, I gave a speech in Shanghai on whether countries are choosing to focus higher education spending on top institutions as a response to the scarcity of funds since the start of the global financial crisis.  I thought some of you might be interested in this, so over the next two days I’ll be sharing some of the data from that presentation.  The story I want to tell today is about how exceptional the Canadian story has been among the

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November 4, 2015 No 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

Five Questions for Ken Coates

So, Ken Coates of the University of Saskatchewan published a paper the week before last arguing that there were too many university students and not enough trades students, so we should reduce university enrolments by a third and what the hell is wrong with kids today anyway?  Despite being not much more than a warmed-over version of the paper he co-authored with Rick Miner in IRPP a couple of years ago, it got some attention because it played directly into both

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April 13, 2015 6 Comments

Maritime Problems

A couple of weeks ago, Leo Charbonneau over at University Affairs wrote a nice little piece on Maritime universities and the trouble they’re having.  The basic message is that universities out there aren’t doomed – part of the “Don’t Panic” line that AUCC seems to be putting out these days.  The argument was essentially: hey, just nudge the participation rate a point or two, and improve retention a little bit, and those plucky little eastern universities will do just fine. Allow

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March 10, 2015 2 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

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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