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By Alex Usher. So, last week we talked about growth in non-academic staff; however, due to data limitations, we could only talk about dollars rather than numbers.  This is because no one actually collects non-academic staff numbers in Canada, and so most of the data (and anecdotes) around “academic bloat” comes from the US.  Last winter, I became sufficiently frustrated with fact-free arguments about “bloated administration” that I devoted part of my holiday to gathering data on this phenomenon.  I never quite finished the project back then, but last week gave me the nudge to try to put all of this data on the table. More...

By Alex Usher. There is an interesting initiative afoot to create something called the Inuit Nunangat University.  A workshop report on the concept is here. Today, I thought I would contribute to the debate by looking at what such an initiative might cost.
Some background: the idea of an Arctic university is not new.  Many people have noted that Canada is the only member of the Arctic Council that does not have a university north of the Arctic Circle. More...

By Alex Usher. The Globe’s Gary Mason wrote an interesting article yesterday about the Gupta resignation.  Actually, let me qualify: he wrote a very odd article, which ignored basically everything his Globe colleagues Simona Chiose and Frances Bula had reported the previous week, in order to peddle a tale in which the UBC Board fired Gupta for wanting to reduce administrative costs. More...

By Alex Usher. 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 for inflation. More...

By Alex Usher. So, yesterday I talked about a big increase in access in the UK, which seems to have little to do with tuition fees.  Today, let’s talk about a developing story in the United States, where a lowering of net prices seems to have had a big impact on access. More...

By Alex Usher. Remember how, in 2012, tuition in England rose by about $10,000-$12,000 (depending on the currency exchange rate you care to use) for everyone, all at once?  Remember how the increase was only offset by an increase in loans, with no increase in means-tested grants?  Remember how everyone said how awful this was going to be for access?
Well, let me show you some interesting data. More...

University academics multitask. Broadly, our time is split between research, teaching and administrative duties. We differ in our aptitudes for each of these. Respective levels of intrinsic motivation vary greatly too. Institutions striving for the Humboldtian ideal of research-led teaching, that magic fusion between the latest ideas and student learning, may seek to nurture our skills and enthusiasms in every domain in order to make well-rounded scholars of us all. More...

On Thursday, 3rd September 2015, the Higher Education Policy Institute publishes Keeping up with the Germans?: A comparison of student funding, internationalisation and research in UK and German universities (HEPI Report 77).
People in England, Wales and Northern Ireland often ask, if Germany can abolish tuition fees, why can’t we? Part of the answer is that Germany sends a lower proportion of young people to university and spends less on each one. When fees existed in some German regions between 2006 and 2015, they were small and those regions which had them were played off against those that did not. More...