Okay folks, time for me to sign off for the year. Two housekeeping notes. First, blog service will resume bright and early on January 6th. Second, this will be my last-ever Friday blog. Many of you have over the years asked how I manage to put out this blog every day. The answer is that it is getting difficult for me to balance this with the growth of our business (it has been quite a good year at HESA Towers),
Good morning all. Today, the CD Howe Institute is releasing a paper I wrote on Performance-Based Financing (PBF) called Funding for Results in Higher Education. It’s a quick tour through the various ways that performance-based financing works around the world—in France, Germany, Scandinavia, as well as the United States—as well as some analysis of what we know of the PBF scheme that Ontario is theoretically implementing over the next couple of years. (NB: The Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities
I have noted over the years that there is a strain of thought in the humanities which absolutely revels in its own demise. I call it “humanities disaster porn”, in which pretty much any tale of atrocities being committed on the humanities must be true because we can conceive of it being true. Remember the rumour about Japan closing down all humanities faculties that even big outlets like the Times Higher fell for? That turned out, on a close read,
Yesterday, I explained how the distribution of funds might occur in a single-envelope PBF system (that is, the dominant system in North America, where indicators generate scores for each institution which then govern the distribution of a pre-set amount of money). And while that is the likely way a PBF system will work in Ontario, it’s not the only possible way and indeed the government has left some hints that it is thinking about an alternative method. The way the
The biggest missing piece in the Ontario government’s proposed performance-funding system is any discussion of the algorithm by which data on various indicators gets turned into an actual allocation to institutions. The lack of such a piece is what leads most observers to conclude that the government has no idea what it’s doing at the moment; however I am a glass-half-full kind of guy and take this as an opportunity to start a discussion that might impact the government’s thinking
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.
