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Tag: Salaries

Classroom Economics (Part 4)

Yesterday we looked at ways to get the teaching budget down.  Today, we’re going to look at the other half of the cost equation: all that overhead.  And we’re going to look at it by asking the question: how big a cut in overhead would it take to equal the effect of replacing 20% of your credit hours with sessionals (which, as we saw yesterday, reduces overall teaching loads by 17%)? Recall the equation: X = aϒ/(b+c), where “X” is the

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January 22, 2015 No Comments

Classroom Economics (Part 3)

(If you’re just tuning in today, you may want to catch up on Part 1 and Part 2) Back to our equation: X = aϒ/(b+c), where “X” is the total number of credit hours a professor must teach each year (a credit hour here meaning one student sitting in one course for one term), “ϒ” is average compensation per professor, “a” is the overhead required to support each professor, “b” is the government grant per student credit hour, and “c” is

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January 21, 2015 9 Comments

Graduate Income Data Miracle on the Rideau

My friend and colleague Ross Finnie has just published a remarkable series of papers on long-term outcomes from higher education, which everyone needs to go read, stat. What he’s done is taken 13 years of student data from the University of Ottawa and linked it to income tax data held by Statistics Canada.  That means he can track income patterns by field of study, not over the puny 6-24 month period commonly used by provincial surveys, or the new 36-month

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November 25, 2014 3 Comments

The Way Forward on Collective Bargaining

So, last week (here, here, and here) I noted that in most parts of the country, total compensation levels have been running more or less in line with changes to total operating grants.  But this is not a reason to become complacent about university finances and future collective bargaining agreements, for two reasons. First, what I’ve been showing is that salary mass has been increasing in line with operating income.  But salary mass and salaries are two different things.  If I give

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October 27, 2014 3 Comments

Operating Budgets

So, yesterday I said it was pretty easy to show what’s going on in university budgets just by looking at operating grants, tuition, and salaries – and so I thought, perhaps, I should practice what I preach.  So here goes: Between 2004-5 and 2012-13, operating grants from provincial governments rose from $8.27 billion to $10.9 billion (all figures inflation-adjusted, expressed in 2012 dollars), an average increase of 3.5% per year.  But this encompasses two very distinct periods.  Up until 2009-10, the rate

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October 21, 2014 3 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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