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Tag: Ontario

Ontario Platform Review

The current Ontario election is possibly the most depressing one I’ve ever lived through.  I agree entirely with Laval’s Stephen Gordon, who describes the province as the northern equivalent of Argentina: formerly great, and utterly unable to deal with decline.  Kathleen Wynne isn’t quite Cristina Fernandez, of course, the Liberals aren’t quite Peronists, and Toronto FC sure ain’t Boca Juniors.  But there are still enough parallels to make you go “hmmmm”. Anyways, where do the three parties stand on post-secondary

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May 27, 2014 No Comments

Trends in Applications

Some interesting trend data to review from Ontario today. First, there’s the fact that applications from secondary schools have dropped by 3% this year, from 92,892 to 89,609 (as of the February snapshot, which for most purposes is as good as the final numbers, since something like 95% of all applicants apply before the end-of-January line).  This is a moderately big deal since it’s the first time since the double cohort that numbers have fallen. Figure 1: Applications from Secondary

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May 14, 2014 No Comments

Teaching Loads, Fairness, and Productivity

It’s been a long time since I’ve been as disappointed by an article on higher education as I was by the Star’s coverage of the release of the new HEQCO paper on teaching and research productivity.  A really long time. If you haven’t read the HEQCO paper yet, do so.  It’s great.  Using departmental websites, the authors (Linda Joncker and Martin Hicks) got a list of people teaching in Economics, Chemistry, and Philosophy at ten Ontario universities.  From course calendars, Google

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March 13, 2014 16 Comments

Essential? Beware of What You Wish For

So I see that COU has commissioned a poll, which has come back with the result that: Ontarians think universities are almost as essential as hospitals and primary/secondary schools. Some highlights: 88 per cent of adult Ontarians ranked universities’ overall contributions to the province as important, just behind hospitals (92 per cent), and elementary and high schools (90 per cent); 72 per cent of adult Ontarians say that teaching at universities to increase knowledge and skills is a very important contribution

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January 30, 2014 No Comments

How Universities Are Becoming More Labour-Intensive

Yesterday, I showed how universities in New Brunswick were – despite welcome new promises of stable funding from the provincial government – facing problems because salary increases were going to eat all the available new money.  Some of you possibly thought I was being alarmist.  But it’s easy enough to show how this can happen.  In Ontario, it already has. For data here, I pulled the financial statements for the last five years at the “Big 8” (Toronto, Waterloo, Western,

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January 7, 2014 5 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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