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Tag: Faculty

A Good Decade for Profs

I was browsing through some Statistics Canada data on university salaries the other day, and I rapidly came to the conclusion that there have been few decades in which it was better to be a prof than the last one. As the following table shows, over the years 2001 to 2009 (the years for which I could get good-quality data from Statscan for free – this email’s not paying a paying gig unfortunately), pay for full professors in non-medical disciplines

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January 10, 2012 4 Comments

Faculty Productivity

It’s easy to get distracted by arguments about whether faculty are paid too much or too little. The better question is: why does everyone get paid on more or less the same scale when the massive differences in productivity between staff are so obvious? Some interesting evidence about this came recently from Texas. Last year, Governor Rick Perry (yes, him… the one who makes Herman Cain look Presidential) asked the state’s public universities to make data available on each professor

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December 7, 2011 5 Comments

The 160 Student Solution

Here’s an important question. Why do we care about how many classes a professor teaches? Virtually every university collective agreement has some kind of minimum or average or desirable teaching load – 2+3, 2+2, etc. It doesn’t really matter since so many professors are buying their way out of these anyway and going down to one class a term. Regardless, though, the unit of analysis here is the course. This makes absolutely no sense. Universities don’t get paid based on

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September 20, 2011 2 Comments

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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September 2, 2011 No Comments

Data Point of the Week: Comparing Academic Salaries

If there’s one subject we write about that gets people riled up, it’s academic salaries in Canada and the U.S. It’s a complicated issue – so let’s look at concrete examples at three of the better-paying Canadian institutions (Trent, Calgary and McMaster) and three prestigious American universities (Dartmouth, Washington and Berkeley). If you just look at baseline salaries for two sets of institutions, you see some pretty big differences as shown in Figure 1, below. The gap is bigger for

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August 24, 2011 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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