Tag: Salaries

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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The Symbolism of Executive Salaries

“Eliminating waste” is a favourite target of politicians who need money for projects, but who don’t want to tell citizens how they plan to pay for those projects.  Build an $8 billion subway with no new taxes?  “Get rid of administrative waste,” says Rob Ford.   Cut taxes, reduce the deficit, and protect military spending, social security, and medicare, at the same time? “Attack waste and administrative costs”, say House Republicans. Bien pensants tend to decry this kind of talk as buffoonish

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The Other Demographic Challenge

Okay, so everyone knows that demography’s an issue in higher education. Fewer students means more competition. More old people means more pressure on pensions and health care and hence more competition for public subsidies. Tough times ahead for higher ed, right? Well, yes. But there’s another impact of demography which I don’t think anyone’s really absorbed yet. It’s the impact of a shrinking or stagnant labour market, and in many ways, it could be the most significant demography-related challenge of

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77% Entitled

At HESA, we’re big on empirical evidence. We like it when people argue with data, rather than resort to the vacuous normative stuff that often passes for debate on issues like tuition fees. So, when I saw that the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers (ANSUT) had published something on out-of-control executive compensation called A Culture of Entitlement which makes extensive use of data to “shed light on the steep increases in compensation for senior administrators since 2004,” I was naturally pleased.

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Hooked on School

What do Canadian students do when they’ve finished their university studies? And how do they differ from students in other parts of the world? We recently had the opportunity to examine country-level graduate surveys around the world. Now, there are important caveats – no two countries conduct the same survey among the same exact population of graduates at the exact same time (and international data agencies like the OECD restrict most of their graduate analysis to fairly basic indicators, such

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