I’ve had a lot of time over the past week to think about the federal budget. And the more I think about it, the more baffled I am about the decision to completely stuff the granting councils. I think it is either a sign of real political ineptness, or that something pretty awful is in the pipeline. It’s not as though the Liberals are averse to spending on Science, per se. The budget dropped hundreds of millions of dollars on
Every year on budget night, we at HESA Towers publish a graph tracking granting council expenditures in real dollars. This year it looks like this: Tri-council Funding Envelopes Some people really like the graph and pass it around and re-tweet it because it shows that whatever governments say about their love for science and innovation, it’s not showing up in budgets. Others (hi Nassif!) dislike it because it doesn’t do justice to how badly researchers are faring under the current
Yesterday I suggested that Ottawa might be as much of the problem in innovation policy as it is the solution. Today I want to make a much stronger policy claim: that Canada has a uniquely stupid policy discourse on innovation. And as Exhibit A in this argument I want to present a piece posted over at Policy Options last week. The article was written by Kat Nejatian, a former staffer to Jason Kenney and now CEO of a payment technology company
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “We really need to have more STEM grads in this country. Really, we ought to be more like Germany or Japan – fewer of these ridiculous philosophy degrees, and more of those lovely, lovely engineers and scientists.” Personally, I’ve heard this one too many times. So, just for yuks, I decided to take a look at the distribution of degrees awarded by field of study across the G7 countries, plus (since I’m
About a month ago, I wrote about whether institutions would adjust their program mix if it would help improve economic growth. Nearly everyone that wrote me implicitly assumed that the “right” mix for economic growth implied a switch to a more STEM-heavy system, before going on to say something like “but what about the humanities?” I found this kind of amusing, because I actually don’t automatically assume that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) degrees are where it’s at in
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.
