By Alex Usher. Something very important happened over the summer: The Ryerson Faculty Union won its case against the university in Ontario Superior Court against the use of student teaching evaluations in tenure and promotion decisions (it was silent on merit pay, but I’m fairly sure that’s because Ryerson academics don’t have it – as legal precedent I’m 100% certain merit pay is affected, too).  This means literally every university in the country is going to have to re-think the evaluation of teaching – which is a fantastic opportunity to have some genuinely interesting, important national conversations on the subject. More...

By Alex Usher. I decided over the summer to try to write an outline sketch of Canadian Higher Education for y’all.  Expect installments periodically.

SNAPSHOT: In 1900, Canadian universities together enrolled 6,641 students.  89% were male, 11% female.  44% of students were in the Arts and Science, while 27% were in medicine, and 11% were in Engineering.

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The key to understanding Canada’s somewhat chaotic higher education system lies in understanding two key phenomena: sectarianism and federalism. More...

By Alex Usher. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) put out a paper on Tuesday entitled Out of the Shadows: Experiences of Contract Academic Staff, which mostly presents data on a survey conducted by the association last year.  While the intentions might have been good, the resulting data – which is already getting lots of media play – needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  And one claim in particular – that the number of sessional faculty has soared by 79% in the past decade – needs to be debunked immediately. More...

By Alex Usher. Yesterday was Education at a Glance release day.  That’s usually the time when I take a look at the latest data from across the OECD  and point out that in fact we in Canada have it pretty good.  Or, at least that was the piece I expected to be writing yesterday morning.  Until I found out that Canadian data was missing from more than just the usual number of tables. More...

By Alex Usher. Let’s start by looking at something really important, which is the difference between total expenditures and operational expenditures.  In a normal year, operating budgets are 60-66% of total budgets.  A little more than half of the non-operating funds go to research, and the rest is split between various things: special purpose accounts, capital, endowment, etc. More...

By Alex Usher. So, the 2016-2017 Financial Information of Universities and Colleges came out in July, and as usual I’ve got some highlights for you. This year, we’ll be doing this as a two-parter, one on income (today) and one on expenditure (tomorrow). For those of you looking for data on community college expenditures, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a few months – Statscan typically doesn’t release that data until December (but rest assured I will cover it when the time comes). More...

By Alex Usher. There are two constructs that make it extremely difficult to talk sensibly about who should pay for higher education.  The first is “affordability” and the second is “independence”, in the sense of students’ independence from the rest of their family.  It’s worth exploring these concepts in detail to see how they complicate analysis. More...