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Tag: Salaries

Some Basically Awful Graduate Outcomes Data

Yesterday, the Council of Ontario Universities released the results of the Ontario Graduates’ Survey for the class of 2012.  This document is a major source of information regarding employment and income for the province’s university graduates.  And despite the chipperness of the news release (“the best path to a job is still a university degree”), it actually tells a pretty awful story when you do things like, you know, place it in historical context, and adjust the results to account

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September 2, 2015 12 Comments

How High Can Pay Go?

A few months ago, in the midst of a very exciting battle of words at Windsor, I got into an internet discussion with a professor who was absolutely outraged by one of the administration’s proposals: namely, to put a ceiling on professors’ salary, including his, after 30 years of service. To step back for a moment: collective bargaining agreements generally outline a grid: a series of salary scales (or ladders, or steps – pick your term), generally one for each

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May 27, 2015 5 Comments

McGill vs. UBC

In eastern parts of the country, if you use the words “the three best universities in Canada”, they look at you slightly oddly.  They know you mean U of T and McGill, but they’re not 100% sure who the third one is.  “UBC?” they ask, uncertainly. This is pure eastern myopia.  Today, I will advance the proposition that by most measures, UBC is substantially ahead of McGill, and is in fact the country’s #2 university. Let’s start with some statistics

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April 27, 2015 4 Comments

Not Mutually Exclusive

One often hears university administrators say things like: “if we don’t reduce growth in salary mass, we’re all in trouble”.  Sometimes, the word “academic” gets thrown in front of salaries, for good measure.  In response, one often hears faculty unions say: “but academic salaries are down as a proportion of operating spending since 1992”, or “salaries as a proportion of the budget have remained constant in recent years”, and conclude from this that salaries can’t possibly be the problem. How

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April 7, 2015 9 Comments

Classroom Economics (The End)

So we spent Monday looking at the economic basics of classroom and teaching loads, and Tuesday looking at how difficult it is to improve the situation by increases in tuition or government grants.  Wednesday we saw that reducing average academic compensation (presumably via increasing the proportion of credits taught by adjuncts) can be quite effective in reducing teaching loads, while on Thursday we saw how trying to achieve a similar effect through attacking costs other than academic compensation would require enormously painful – and probably

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January 23, 2015 2 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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