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Tag: Faculty

Financing Canadian Universities: A Curious Story (Part 2)

So yesterday we noted how universities’ per-student income had increased 40%.  But we also noted that it’s a universally acknowledged truth that pretty much everyone in higher ed will swear up and down that things are worse than ever, always doing more with less, etc.  Is there a way to reconcile these competing notions without simply coming to the conclusion that profs and administrators are delusional/greedy? Well, sort of.  Let’s start with Figure 1. Figure 1 – Income per FTE Student

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September 10, 2013 10 Comments

What if Higher Education Subsidies Were Transparent?

 An interesting little exercise in budget analysis: There are just under 5600 humanities professors at Canadian universities, and 7600 in the social sciences (excluding law, which is another 600 or so).  On average, these people make about $108,000/year (slightly higher in social sciences, slightly lower in humanities).  Add another 25% on that for payroll taxes, health, and pension, and the direct costs of employing these folks is about $135,000 per year.  That comes out to about $1.85 billion in total.

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June 13, 2013 14 Comments

A Revolution in Faculty Bargaining?

Earlier this week, I was riffing on how to make good salary comparisons when I came across a faculty union which has been doing just that. The faculty union at the University of Victoria is feeling a bit aggrieved that its members’ pay is lower than at comparable universities.  When I first saw their numbers, I was a bit skeptical: UVic went through a significant generational shift nine or ten years ago, so their age/rank profile might potentially account for some of

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February 15, 2013 6 Comments

If University Presidents had a Union

It occurred to me while writing that last piece about salary comparisons: what if University Presidents used the same set of arguments about salary that professors do?  What if we set their salaries as a function of what a comparator set of institutions were paying? For this exercise, I have compared the presidential salaries at each of the top eight Canadian institutions in the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities to those at the nearest comparator institutions among public universities

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February 13, 2013 1 Comment

Rough Times at ST. FX

I’ve been saying for awhile now that falling government revenue and rising faculty salary expectations have made a really knock-down drag-em-out faculty strike somewhere in Canada – the kind that knocks out an entire semester – almost inevitable.  The one that started Monday at Nova Scotia’s St. Francis Xavier University may not last that long, but boy does it look ugly. Basically, the dispute appears to be as follows: Management is offering somewhere between a 6 and 7% salary increase

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January 30, 2013 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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