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By Alex Usher. Back about 15 years ago, the relevant technology for email surveys became sufficiently cheap and ubiquitous that everyone started using them.  I mean, everyone.  So what has happened over the last decade and a half has been a proliferation of surveys and with it – surprise, surprise – a steady decline in survey response rates.  We know that these low-participation surveys (nearly all are below 50%, and most are below 35%) are reliable, in the sense that they give us similar results year after year.  But we have no idea whether they are accurate, because we have no way of dealing with response bias. More...

By Alex Usher. Like many people, I am in favour of better data on the higher education sector.  But while this call unites a lot of people, there is remarkably little thinking that goes into the question of how to achieve it.  This is a problem, because unless we arrive at a better common understanding of both the cost and the utility of different kinds of data, we are going to remain stuck in our current position. More...

By Alex Usher. A couple of week ago, CBC decided to make a big deal about how terrible Canadian universities were for not collecting data on race (see Why so many Canadian universities Know so little about their own racial diversity). As you all know, I’m a big proponent of better data in higher education. But the effort involved in getting new data has to be in some way proportional to the benefit derived from that data. And I’m pretty sure this doesn’t meet that test.
In higher education, there are only two points where it is easy to collect data from students: at the point of application, and at the point of enrolment. More...

By Alex Usher. 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. More...

By Alex Usher. A few months ago, someone asked me what I wanted to see in the budget.  I said i) investment in aboriginal PSE, ii) system changes for the benefit of mature students and iii) changes to loan repayment (specifically, a reduction of the maximum loan payment from 20%  of disposable income to 15%).  To my great pleasure, the government came through on two of those wishes.  But there is still a lot of work to do yet. More...

By Alex Usher. 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 environment.  Now, these critics have a point, but I think some of the criticism misunderstands why government funds research in the first place. More...

By Alex Usher. The South China Morning Post ran an interesting piece recently on the roll-out of China’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan for Education.  It suggested that in the central and western regions of the country – that is, the poorer, non-coastal bits – the bulk of the task of educational development , including higher education, is going to fall on the private sector.  And yes, this is communist China we’re talking about. More...

By Alex Usher. Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Canada is not sufficiently innovative, and part of the reason is that we don’t spend enough on research.  It’s not that we don’t spend enough on *public* research; adjusted for GDP, we actually do above-average on that.  What pulls us down is in international comparisons corporate R & D.  Our narrow-minded, short-sighted, resource-obsessed business class spends far less on R&D than its equivalents in most other country, and that is what gives us such a low overall R&D spend. More...

By Alex Usher. The practice of granting universities representation in Parliament seems to originate in Scotland sometime in the late 15th or early 16th centuries; certainly by the time James VI of Scotland took the Crown of England in 1603, it was well established. Upon James’ accession to the throne in London, he created Parliamentary constituencies for both Oxford and Cambridge, and gave each two seats (i.e. they were multi-member constituencies and the top two vote-getters won seats). Oxford’s church connections meant that it reliably delivered Royalist or Tory MPs, and some of the greatest names of the age represented it in Parliament, including Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. Cambridge, on the other hand, was a hotbed of revolutionary activity and was represented at various points by two of Oliver Cromwell’s sons. Briefly, this system spread to the colonies: in the late seventeenth century William & Mary had a seat in the Virginia legislature. More...

By Alex Usher. Morning all.  A long night last night at HESA Towers as we covered Budget 2017, which contained an exhaustingly large list of little programs (as well as a few big ones) affecting post-secondary institutions.  You can find our full budget analysis here.  My thanks to the HESA crew – Paul, Melonie, Johnathan and Jackie – for sticking it through the evening. More...