Keller’s Uniblog
Business grads: We’ll pay you to not come to work… yet
A twist on downsizing in investment banking
Recent university grad looking to get into investment banking? One I-bank will pay you to go and take a sabbatical year — before you even start work.
That’s the word from Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank that, like every other player on Wall Street, is feeling the pain of the recession. So it’s temporarily laying off employees who haven’t even done their first day of work yet. According to an article from Bloomberg yesterday (the best link I could find was here; click and scroll down a bit), 20 per cent of CS’s next class of investment bank analysts have accepted a US$40,000 offer to defer their employment start date until July, 2010. The offer was made to U.S. college graduates recruited to the bank, who would have started this summer.
The news is one more example of the poor job environment facing aspiring bankers. But CS’s long term view is surprisingly confident. After all, CS isn’t eliminating these not-yet-employees. It’s asking them to wait a year — by which time it presumably expects that its services and their skills will be more in demand. Instead of burning the proverbial furniture to heat the building, it’s trying to hang on to the most talented young recruits, assuming that it will soon need them. As the cliche goes, only time will tell.
Two cheers for Ontario’s school information website
Ontario’s new School Information site a (small) victory for parents
“Due to high volumes,” explains the Ontario ministry of education’s new School Information site, “you may experience problems accessing the School Information Finder. Please try again later.” Oh, I’ve been trying again later. Time and again, hour after hour. For most of this afternoon, I was unable to get beyond the homepage. The reason? Ontario’s new, searchable database of elementary and high schools is apparently very popular — as popular among parents as it is unpopular among a certain group of professional education lobbyists.
The website doesn’t tell you much that you don’t already know — this has been the government’s main defence against the critics — but it’s pleasantly surprising nonetheless. Ontario’s education ministry and establishment has a long-standing aversion to the gathering (let alone the publication) of any data that might allow anyone to identify problems in the province’s public education system. We don’t have standardized test, we don’t have high school leaving exams, we have little with which to measure school progress (or lack thereof) and little useful data for parents choosing a school for their child, or parents who would like to figure out where their school stands so as to light a fire under the administration to improve things.
Which may explain the response to the School Information site, which today apparently overwhelmed the Ontario’s government’s web servers. People are starved for information. Does the site give them everything they want? No. Not even close. But it does offer an opportunity to see how your local school(s) measure up in a variety of areas. When you’re starved for information, even the smallest disclosure is likely to attract your excited attention. People may have been even more frantic to get on to website because news stories published earlier today seemed to be suggesting that the site might be shut down, or at least curtailed. (And a “compare schools” feature was removed before I had a chance to look at the site. Not to worry: all this means is that you can’t make side-by-side comparisons on the screen. You can still do them yourself with a printer and/or a pad and paper.) I’m sure many parents had the same reaction I had: if somebody doesn’t want us to see this information, it must be good.
The lead spokesperson of those opposing the website has been Annie Kidder of People for Education. She told the Globe that her problem with people having access to the info on this website is that, “[y]ou see divisions along class lines in terms of the schools parents are choosing… But the job of government is to look out for the overall public good. Their job is not to help me work the system or get around the rules.”
It’s not clear what “rules” this website would help people to get around. Ontarians already have some (limited) choice when it comes to deciding where their kids will go to school within the public system. They may (or may not) be able to choose among more than one local school that has not reached its enrollment limit, and is accepting students. They may be able to choose between a local publicly-funded Catholic school and a local public school. Its hard to understand how anyone is better served if these choices are made in an information vacuum.
People for Education may be opposed to the new website, but People Who Want My Kid to Get An Education are the reason the site is overwhelmed by visitors. Information is power. People want information. They want to feel that they have choice and that they can in some way influence the often unhappy outcomes generated by a monolithic, bureaucratic education system where quality education is rarely the first priority for anyone, save parents. For parents, their child’s education is not some abstract and theoretical construct, to be balanced against other goods. They want their child to attend the best school possible and they want information showing that the school their child is attending is meeting the highest standards. (And if it isn’t, well, they want to know that too — along with what the school is doing to improve). Parents are going to grab on to any and all information that will help them meet those goals.
People for Education is particularly upset about the inclusion of demographic data on the website: for each high school, for example, you can see what percentage of its students met the average on the province-wide literacy test or in Academic Math, but you also learn the percentage of students whose first language is not English and the percentage of parents with a university education. Demography can sometimes be destiny; for example, the children of upper income, university educated parents are more likely to themselves perform well in high school and attend university. The fear that People for Education seems to have is that People Who Want My Kid to Get An Education will use this website to make bad choices. You know, the weathy and educated will be scrambling to get into schools filled with students of the similarly wealthy and educated.
But to some extent that already happens. It happens because people with means have always chosen to live in certain neighbourhoods, close to certain schools. If they are wealthy enough or frugal enough, they do it by sending their kids to private school. Parents will make rational choices to benefit their children, and woe betide the politician who seeks to thwart them. But most parents can’t do what the wealthy can do. Their only hope is for the local public school to be as good as possible. That’s their battle. It’s impossible to imagine how less information — in particular information about underperforming schools — makes that outcome more likely.
As I browsed through the database (I finally got into it this evening), what jumped out at me is how some schools in Toronto with high non-English speaking populations perform at an extremely high level, while others do not. What are these schools, these neighbourhoods, these parents, these kids getting right? What other factors are at play? And at those schools that are falling behind, what can the province, the school board, the administration, the teachers, the parents and the students do to raise outcomes?
We as a society can either provide as much information as possible so that parents, armed with information, can deeply involve themselves in the project to improve schools, or we can try to try to keep a tight lid on information that might highlight areas of failure, for fear that such information will be misused.
I know what most course most parents, and most citizens, would choose.
College presidents: gaining on their more highly paid university peers
The pay of college executives still trails that of universities, but they’re catching up
Colleges are often unfairly seen as the second tier of the higher education universe—and, as we noted last year, that extends to the compensation of college administrators, who have long been paid substantially less than their university peers
So did anything change in 2008? Yes. Ontario’s Sunshine List salary disclosure was released today, and the tally of Ontario college employees earning more than $100,000 (the threshold for inclusion on the list) is, as always, much shorter than the count for universities. However, the number of college senior administrators earning more than $200,000 has grown by nearly two-thirds, and several highly paid college heads are taking home university-president-sized paychecks.
The highest paid college president in Ontario is Frederick Miner of Seneca College. With a salary of $406,000 and taxable benefits worth $5,000, his compensation is enough to put him squarely in the upper tier of university administrators. Miner’s salary is more than that paid to the president of the largest university in the country, David Naylor of the University of Toronto. (The latter’s salary was $380,000).
Conestoga College president John Tibbits was paid $387,000. That’s more than the president of neighbouring Wilfrid Laurier University. (The president of the other university just down the road, the University of Waterloo was however paid about $101,000 more).
The presidents of five other Ontario colleges — Humber, Sheridan, George Brown, Mohawk and Algonquin — earned over $300,000. Their pay is below that awarded the presidents of large Ontario universities, but in line with the compensation given to presidents of smaller Ontario universities. For example, Dennis Mock, president of Nipissing University, Ontario’s second-smallest public university, was paid $271,000. Bonnie Patterson, president of Brock, last year received total compensation of $338,000.
The pay gap between colleges and universities appears to be larger in Western Canada. According to BC public sector salary disclosure, as compiled by the Vancouver Sun, there were 182 employees of the BC university and college system earning more than $200,000. (Data is for either 2006-07 or 2007-08). Of those 182 highly paid individuals, only two were from the college or institute system: the acting and outgoing presidents of BCIT. (What’s more, hardly any of the 182 members of the over $200K club came from the former university college system; almost all worked at one of the province’s four traditional universities, in particular UBC).
Who’s in the $500,000 club?
Who is Canada’s most highly paid academic? Surprise: he isn’t a university president
What does it take to make half a million dollars in a year? According to new figures, released by the government of Ontario today under the province’s decade-old “sunshine law,” two university administrators did just that.
Also, for the second year in a row, the province’s most well-compensated university officer isn’t a president. And one of the province’s most highly compensated university presidents is a former president who stepped down nearly two years ago. These are just some of the revelations in Ontario’s salary disclosures from 2008, which were released mid-day Tuesday on a provincial government website.
John Lyon, University of Toronto’s managing director of investment strategy topped the list with a salary of $494,598, with taxable benefits of $62,876, which brought his total compensation to $557,474.
For full OnCampus coverage of university salaries 2009, click here.
Coming in a close second place was McMaster University president Peter George, who made $524,435, with taxable benefits of $9,478, for total earnings of $533,913 last year. That’s up nearly 6 per cent from his pay the year before, which hit $505,000 in salary and benefits.
Other top earners include University of Waterloo President David Johnston, who made $488,242 total compensation and York University President Mamdouh Shoukri, who, despite his university’s lengthy strike, took home $484,357. In fifth place was University of Guelph president Alastair Summerlee, who made a total of $464,013.
One of the surprises was to find York’s former president, Lorna Marsden, still on the list. Marsden stepped down from the chief executive role in the spring of 2007, and was replaced by Shoukri. However, York in 2008 still has Marsden on the payroll as “president emerita” – and paid her $412,000. That’s more than is paid to most regular, still-on-the-job university presidents.
One other surprise: the most highly paid academic in Canada isn’t at an Ontario university. Ontario university presidents are apparently earning less than some of their peers at Western Canada’s largest universities. Continuing a trend first noticed last year, there are six senior administrators in Western Canada who reported salary and benefits worth more than the package given to Ontario’s most highly paid university president, Peter George. On the list are the president of the University of Calgary, the president of the University of British Columbia, and four executives at the University of Alberta, including President Indira Samarasekera, who received total compensation worth $627,000, or nearly $100,000 more than George. But one of the U of A’s vice-presidents, VP of facilities and operations Don Hickey, earned more than his boss. In 2007-08 he received total remuneration and benefits worth $688,000 — making him Canada’s most highly paid academic.
Go West, ambitious university president
Pay packages appear to be bigger out West — but that may be because BC and Alberta disclosure is more honest
Aspiring university presidents and senior academics looking to maximize their market value may want to look to Western Canada, where the leading universities appear to be offering their top executives compensation superior to that offered in the rest of Canada.
According to the most recent salary disclosures, at least six Western Canadian university administrators are making more than Ontario’s most highly paid university president, McMaster University’s Peter George. In 2008, George reported salary and benefits worth $534,000. During the 2007-08 fiscal year, four senior executives at the University of Alberta, including the president, were paid more. Indira Samarasekera, the U of A’s president, received salary and benefits worth $627,000. Her number two, provost Carl Amrhein, earned $618,000. Two other executives at the U of A earned more: Phyllis Clark, VP of finance and administration, received total compensation worth $654,000 and Don Hickey, VP of facilities and operations, received $668,000.
The president of the University of Calgary, Harvey Weingarten, earned $557,000 in total compensation in 2008. Stephen Toope, president of the University of British Columbia, received total compensation worth $579,000.
In Ontario, the next highest paid president after McMaster’s George is Waterloo’s David Johnston; in 2008, he received $488,000 in total compensation. The third most highly paid Ontario president was York University’s Mamdouh Shoukri at $464,000.
The pay seems higher out West — and that is in part due to the stated objective of some Western universities to offer executive pay that meets or exceeds what’s offered by top institutions in the rest of Canada and the United States. For example, UBC explicitly benchmarks its president’s salary against those peers. “UBC is one of the highest ranked universities in Canada, and one of the top 40 universities in the world,” says the university’s statement on senior administrator compensation. “As such, UBC seeks to retain and attract the best senior administrators it can by remaining competitive in its compensation practices with other large research-intensive universities represented by the G13 (i.e., leading research-intensive universities in Canada), and in particular the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta, and with the global market for senior administrator talent generally.”
David Naylor, president of the University of Toronto, reported $430,000 in total compensation in the most recent year: $380,000 in salary and $50,000 in benefits.
The pay packages appear to be larger out West, but that may be partly an accounting wrinkle: compensation disclosure by Alberta and BC universities is more honest and complete. In Ontario, as in BC and Alberta, executives must report base salary and other compensation. However, Alberta and BC appear to be fully (or at least more fully) expensing the cost of their senior administrators’ supplemental pension payments, whereas Ontario’s salary disclosure does not appear to include this. Pension costs are not cash payments made in 2008, but rather the estimated present cost of the pension benefits earned in 2008. Many Canadian administrators are going to get large pensions on retirement, the cost of which in the present is substantial, and should be recorded and disclosed. Out West, it is.
For example, U of A president Samarasekera’s total compensation of $627,000 exceed that of every Ontario university president. However, her base salary of $436,000 is less than the base pay given to the top three Ontario presidents. What puts her total compensation over the top is $191,000 in “other non-cash benefits.” The largest part of that is pension benefits. UBC’s compensation disclosure for president Toope breaks it down even further: $378,000 in salary, a bonus of $50,000, “other compensation” of $65,000 and pension expense of $85,000. Ontario’s Sunshine Law salary disclosure covers the first three of those items but does not appear to completely cover pension expenses.
For example, it was revealed last year that, on retirement, McMaster’s George is set to receive a golden handshake of $1.4 million, paid out at the rate of $99,999/year for 14 years. This does not appear to have ever been accounted for in McMaster’s disclosures under Ontario’s Sunshine List. (It is not clear how such a payment — which McMaster does not consider a pension — would be treated by Alberta or BC compensation disclosure requirements). Nor does it appear that Peter George’s supplemental pension benefits have been disclosed as completely as those of his Alberta and BC peers. McMaster’s Sunshine Law disclosure says that George received salary of $524,000 and “taxable benefits” of less than $10,000. It seems a safe bet that the cost of his various pension and other benefits is considerably larger than this, but Ontario’s transparency law does not require quite as much transparency as BC and Alberta.
Comparing “total compensation” at Alberta/BC universities with those in Ontario is thus not always an entirely equivalent comparison, as it may somewhat understate the compensation of Ontario administrators. (That wording is deliberately chosen: it’s not that Alberta and BC are overstating executive compensation, but rather that Ontario is understating it). The bottom line, however, is that senior administrators in Alberta and BC are well paid, and at top universities, senior executives’ salaries compete with what is offered by leading universities in Ontario. No matter how you slice it, Western presidents aren’t getting short changed. For example, in 2008, U of A president Samarasekera’s total compensation rose 6.1 per cent.
(Ontario presidents aren’t exactly suffering, either).
And what about those senior execs at the U of A who earned more than the president? The university’s annual report explains that “in the current year, certain individuals became eligible for an additional six month professional leave. Included in non-cash benefits is the equivalent of an additional six months salary for Vice-President Finance and Administration ($176,000) and Vice-President Facilities Operations ($179,000).”
The two VPs, Clark and Hickey, were not paid those benefits in 2009 — but, in another act of Western accounting honesty, the university calculated and reported the cost of their six month leaves (which they will take later, perhaps after retirement) on its 2008 statement of executive compensation.
How much does your president make, 2009 edition
We’ll have complete coverage online later today
UPDATED: For complete coverage of University Salaries 2009, click here.
Ontario this morning released its annual Sunshine List of public sector employees paid more than $100,000. As always, the list includes all university and college employees in the province.
We’re preparing a number of articles right now; look for us for full coverage throughout the day from me, Karen Pinchin and Joey Coleman.
I’m just now taking a look at how university presidents’ salaries in Ontario compare to what we know about pay in Western Canada. The conclusion seems to be: go West, ambitious academic administrator. More in just a moment.
Doctor shortage? Fence them in
The tricks provinces play to keep medical school graduates from moving
Last week, certain parts of Quebec’s French-language media got themselves all hot and bothered by the following discovery: many graduates of McGill University medical school move to… Ontario. Or Western Canada. Or the rest of the world.
The table below shows where 2006 graduates of Canada’s medical school were practicing, two years after exiting their post-MD training. McGill’s “problem”? It has the highest percentage of graduates who have moved to another province or country.
Training physicians is expensive, and provincial governments assume much of the cost of that training, hence the complaint. And the desire, on the part of some, to find ways to further fence in med school graduates: you know, if you want to go to medical school, you have to promise to never leave the country, or to spend umpteen years in a rural area. Some provinces, in particular Quebec, appear to feel themselves squeezed in the same way as some Third World countries are: their best and brightest and most educated leave.
But restrictions on mobility, as the experience of any Third World country can tell us, don’t tend to work. And Canada already imposes extensive restrictions on the labour mobility of doctors. And yet we still have doctor shortages in many places.
Canada’s restrictions on physicians start right up front–when prospective doctors apply to medical school. In all other areas, Canadian higher education is open to the most talented, regardless of whether they come from other provinces or overseas. The University of British Columbia does not turn away qualified applicants because they happen to live in Manitoba or Ontario — unless, that is, those applicants want to go to medical school. By order of every provincial government except one, medical school seats are overwhelmingly restricted to those who already live in the province. Just look at page 2 of this table, from the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada.
The one province that does not impose a locals-only policy on its medical schools? Ontario.
UBC, the only medical school in BC, reserves 95% of its seats for BC residents. U Saskatchewan and U Manitoba, the only medical schools in their respective provinces, each set aside 90% of seats for locals. Dalhousie and Memorial, the only medical schools in Atlantic Canada, take the same approach, with a careful apportioning of seats among residents of the various Atlantic provinces. Quebec puts its medical schools in the same straight jacket, such that McGill — one of North America’s oldest and most prestigious medical schools — must reserve 91% of its seats for provincial residents.
And yet a substantial percentage of grads from almost every medical school leave the province. McGill’s numbers are the highest, but all Canadian medical schools are “bleeding” graduates to other provinces or countries. Look at Memorial: almost all of its students come from Atlantic Canada, yet a third of those who exited its post-MD training in 2006 are practicing elsewhere. (Go to page 132 of this document and you see that they have moved to Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and BC). Even UBC, which accepts almost no non-BC medical students, sends a substantial number of its graduates outside the province. (Most went to Ontario and Alberta. A few went to Quebec).
Obama’s simple, sensible, impossible education plan
He wants higher standards, tougher tests, merit pay for teachers — excellent ideas all. And in Canada, they would get him labeled as a right wing nut.
The US President gave a speech last week that reminds us why it can sometimes be a good idea to put highly educated people into positions of political responsibility. Obama unveiled his plans for American education, laying out a framework for improving educational performance by means of steps that are logical, sensible, evidence-based—and, oh yes, unacceptable to large parts of his own party.
The first clue that the Obama plan makes sense? It’s written in plain English. He did not invoke weasel words or marketing-speak or the “vague, cloudy euphemisms” that Orwell warned against in Politics and the English Language. You may disagree with what Obama said, but you can at least understand it. It is clearly worded because it is based on clear thinking.
And the reason many in his party will disagree with it? Because Obama wants to improve America’s disappointing educational results by raising standards; imposing new and better tests to measure where education is improving and where it is not; rewarding teachers who succeed in improving educational outcomes; and transforming the public school monopoly by allowing the creation of more charter schools, which are basically private-ish magnet schools funded by public money. The whole focus of the plan is on outcomes, namely more students getting more/better educations, with those outcomes objectively measured by tests.
The President also wants to spend more on education—okay, so at least there’s something in there to antagonize Republicans—but the goal is about “ensuring not only that teachers and principals get the funding that they need, but that the money is tied to results.”
“... we will end what has become a race to the bottom in our schools and instead spur a race to the top by encouraging better standards and assessments. Now, this is an area where we are being outpaced by other nations. It’s not that their kids are any smarter than ours — it’s that they are being smarter about how to educate their children. They’re spending less time teaching things that don’t matter, and more time teaching things that do. They’re preparing their students not only for high school or college, but for a career. We are not. Our curriculum for 8th graders is two full years behind top performing countries. That’s a prescription for economic decline. And I refuse to accept that America’s children cannot rise to this challenge. They can, and they must, and they will meet higher standards in our time.
So let’s challenge our states — let’s challenge our states to adopt world-class standards that will bring our curriculums to the 21st century. Today’s system of 50 different sets of benchmarks for academic success means 4th grade readers in Mississippi are scoring nearly 70 points lower than students in Wyoming — and they’re getting the same grade. Eight of our states are setting their standards so low that their students may end up on par with roughly the bottom 40 percent of the world.
That’s inexcusable. That’s why I’m calling on states that are setting their standards far below where they ought to be to stop low-balling expectations for our kids. The solution to low test scores is not lowering standards — it’s tougher, clearer standards.
Living as I do in a province that has no standardized high school leaving exams; where we have no idea what our public education system’s real “outcomes” are or whether they are improving; where an 80% grade at one school is not comparable to an 80% at another; where students enrolled at a public school and receiving unsatisfactory marks can go to private degree mill for a course or two, and pay to get the mark they need; AND have those marks appear on their regular high school transcript; AND apply to university or college using those marks… well, let’s just say that the Obama speech gave me a little frisson of…. hey, what was that? Ah yes: the man calls it “hope.”
Science minister answers Globe question
Yes, he does believe in evolution. So what was that Globe story about, exactly?
There was something more than a bit weird about today’s front-page Globe and Mail story, in which the reporter for some reason asked Gary Goodyear, the federal minister of science, whether he believes in evolution.
I don’t know the context of the question, but let’s give the Globe the benefit of the doubt: maybe this was something worth asking. In any case, Goodyear gave a non-committal answer (albeit not a particularly politically astute one, since he for some reason chose to raise the fact that he’s a Christian). Now, remember that most answers given by most politicians most of the time are non-committal, precisely because they have become justifiably paranoid about falling prey to a gotcha moment. Anyhow, the Globe took Mr. Goodyear’s response and decided to run with the following headline: “Minister won’t confirm belief in evolution.”
In the first sentence of the story, the reporter suggests a link between federal cuts to science funding and the minister’s alleged uneasiness with evolution/science. The two are connected? Really? Based on what evidence? Has anyone ever credibly alleged that any of the various increases and decreases in research and post-secondary funding under the Tories have been caused by a minister’s or the Cabinet’s religiously-motivated antipathy to science? The lead of the story reads, “Canada’s science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won’t say if he believes in evolution.” And the story continues trying to mine the tories-cut-research-funding-because-they-are-religious-troglodytes vein: “A funding crunch, exacerbated by cuts in the January budget, has left many senior researchers across the county scrambling to find the money to continue their experiments. Some have expressed concern that Mr. Goodyear, a chiropractor from Cambridge, Ont., is suspicious of science, perhaps because he is a creationist.”
Later in the story, two members of the academy go on to express their concerns about Goodyear’s alleged creationism. But unless I’m missing something, the “concern” that has been “expressed ” about Mr. Goodyear being “suspicious” of science was not expressed until yesterday, when the Globe speed dialed two people, told them the minister might not believe in evolution—and asked them if this discovery raised any “concern” that they might like to “express.” It’s like the old joke about journalism: reporter calls up subject, says “would you say this is an outrage?” Subject begins answering question. Reporter interrupts, says, “no, I mean, would you please say, ‘this is an outrage.’”
And what are we to make of this phrase from the Globe: “… Mr. Goodyear, a chiropractor from Cambridge, Ont., is suspicious of science, perhaps because he is a creationist.” I’m not sure if the phrasing is sloppy or deliberate; read as written, The Globe is saying that Goodyear is a creationist. (Whatever exactly that means.) The “perhaps” is not hedging the possibility that he might not be a creationist, but is rather equivocating on the source of his alleged suspicion of science. Is he suspicious of science because he is a creationist—or could there be some other source of this man’s antipathy to the modern world, which incidentally is connected to his government’s cuts to science funding? Inquiring minds want to know.
Anyhow, today the minister told CTV that “of course” he believes in evolution.
And so the news cycle turns. Moving on.
The college football coach makes HOW much?
Survey reveals jaw-dropping salaries at US private universities — but U.S. presidential salaries not out of line with those in Canada
A study of compensation at U.S. private universities, compiled by The Chronicle of Higher Education, shows that many of the highest paid people in American academia are not university presidents.
In the number one spot: The football coach at the University of Southern California, Pete Carroll, who made US$4.4 million in 2007. Second place went to David Silvers, a dematology professor at Columbia University’s medical school, was was paid US$4.3 million. And seven of the eight remaining spots in the top 10 were held by medical school professors and administrators; the only exception is David Swensen, who manages the money in Yale University’s endowment. He was paid US$3.1 million.
In fact, no president of a private American university comes close to cracking the top 10. Only one president made more than US$1 million: Nicholas Zeppos of Vanderbilt. In second place is Ron Daniels, a Canadian (and former dean of the University of Toronto law school) who is earning US$605,000 as the new president of the University of Pennsylvania.
That the highest university salaries are going to top medical researchers is not surprising, given what top U.S. medical specialists can earn in private practice. The shock is just how high, high is. The Chronicle found 46 medical faculty and administrators earning more than $1 million. Based on what we know about pay at Canadian universities (see Maclean’s OnCampus coverage, and Ontario’s salary disclosure of all public employees making over $100K, the only such comprehensive public sector salary disclosure available), no Canadian university can come close to competing with the Brink’s trucks filled with cash being given to the most super of U.S. medical superstars. Leaving senior university administrators aside, there are almost no Ontario professors making more than $300,000 — let alone the $2 million, $3 million and $4 million the Chronicle found a small number of super-superstars taking home in the U.S.
(One caveat: perhaps because of the corporate structure of U.S. university hospitals, doctors who in Canada may be counted as hospital employees are apparently south of the border sometimes counted as university employees, of a university-run hospital. And if we look at hospital salaries in Canada, there are a number of senior hospital officials and doctors earning salaries that, at a university, would be chart-topping. For example, the president and CEO of Toronto’s University Health Network, which oversees several (U of T teaching) hospitals, was paid $836,000 last year. And there are a number of Ontario hospital-based physicians on the list making more than $300,000 or even $400,000.)
And unlike the U.S., when it comes to university sports, Canadian coaches are not among the pay elite. In Ontario, the list of university employees earning more than $100,000 runs to 189 pages of tiny type—but it includes the names of only four coaches. The most highly compensated, at $133,000 a year, is the University of Western Ontario football coach.
The big surprise is that, while a small number of U.S. academic super duper stars — especially in sports and medicine — are earning far more than their Canadian counterparts, there does not appear to be a pay disparity between Canadian and U.S. university presidents. There may have been a gap once upon a time, but Canadian presidential and senior executive salaries have risen substantially over the past decade. According to the Chronicle, the average compensation of the president a private U.S. university classified as a “research” university was US$310,000. How does that compare to Canada? Most Ontario presidents are earning more.
Virginity for sale: grad student selling it online
Part of her “thesis project”; bids up to $3.8 million
Natalie Dylan, a 22-year old women’s studies graduate from Sacremento, California, is auctioning off her virginity. She writes in the Daily Beast that she is preparing to enter graduate school and is “exploring my upcoming thesis project: the value of virginity”:
“It started in college, where my eyes were opened by my Women’s Studies professors and fellow classmates. I came to understand the role of “woman” spanning culture and time. At the university level, I was given permission to think differently and form a moral code of my own design. College opened my eyes.
Like most little girls, I was raised to believe that virginity is a sacred gift a woman should reserve for just the right man. But college taught me that this concept is just a tool to keep the status quo intact. Deflowering is historically oppressive—early European marriages began with a dowry, in which a father would sell his virginal daughter to the man whose family could offer the most agricultural wealth. Dads were basically their daughters’ pimps.
When I learned this, it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what’s to stop me from benefiting from that? It is mine, after all. And the value of my chastity is one level on which men cannot compete with me. I decided to flip the equation, and turn my virginity into something that allows me to gain power and opportunity from men. I took the ancient notion that a woman’s virginity is priceless and used it as a vehicle for capitalism.”
Interested parties can bid and consummate the deal at the Bunny Ranch, a house of prostitution in Nevada that is sort of like this, but without the musical numbers. Dylan claims that bidding for the right to deflour her has reached…. US$3.8 million. The oldest profession is supposed to be recession-proof, but if you find that number a little hard to believe, you are not alone.
But the alleged principal investigator’s publicity-seeking exaggerations aside, the question she claims to be trying to answer is a real, graduate-school-appropriate question. How much is virginity worth? You’d love to see someone like this guy considering the issue: his months with a Chicago crack-dealing gang allowed him to precisely measure the degree to which drug dealing can be a remarkably low-income business for most of the people involved (but not for a very small number of people at the top of the pyramid). I suspect prostitution is a similar story.
Oh, wait a second… Dylan is apparently now reconsidering her project.
York back-to-work legislation: Day 2
Minister calls for speedy passage; NDP continues to delay
The New Democrats say they won’t agree to a marathon debate in the Ontario legislature that could see legislation aimed at ending a long strike at York University passed more quickly.
The Liberal government says it’s willing to debate the back-to-work bill until midnight at the Opposition’s request, but the NDP says it will oppose a night sitting.
NDP Leader Howard Hampton says he’s not playing games by refusing to go along with the legislation.
He says he wants to debate the bill because Ontarians need to know about the chronic underfunding of the province’s universities and colleges.
The Progressive Conservatives slammed the Liberals in the legislature for failing to take action sooner to help end the 12-week strike.
With the premier absent from the legislature, it was up to Colleges and Universities Minister John Milloy to call on all parties to pass the back-to-work legislation quickly.
The Liberals and Progressive Conservatives had hoped for speedy passage over the weekend but the New Democrats voted against the bill.
The strike has kept about 50,000 York students out of classes since early November, but about 5,000 students have been allowed to return under a special deal with the university.
The government says it’s unlikely students will return to school this week unless the New Democrats have a change of heart.
The Liberals say Thursday is the earliest the legislation could be passed – so the school likely won’t reopen before Feb. 2.
— The Canadian Press
Calls grow for back-to-work order in York strike
Toronto newspapers blame union for impasse, urge McGuinty government to step in
Montreal mayor Camillien Houde said that to lead people, you first had to know where they were going.
If the editorial boards of Toronto’s newspapers are any indication, public opinion—centre, left and right—has run out of patience, and wants an immediate end to the strike by teaching assistants, research assistants and sessional lecturers at York. Canada’s third-largest university has been shut down since November.
This morning, all four Toronto dailies called for the government to pass back-to-work legislation. The editorials sometimes invoked common images—metaphors like “held hostage;” reminders that a premier who called himself “the education premier” should be troubled by the inability of 50,000 university students to get an education—but there were subtle differences in the way each argued the case for government intervention, as well as whom they blamed for the impasse.
According to the Sun (headline: “McGuinty fiddles while York burns”), York students are victims of a “fraud”, which it says “has been perpetrated by labour and management at York, aided yesterday by Premier Dalton McGuinty.”
“It’s fraud because students are not getting the education they were promised and for which they paid, in advance, in good faith.” The Sun called on the government to “recall the legislature and pass back-to-work legislation.”
The Globe and Mail, surprisingly, delivers an editorial that is a blistering screed against the union. Whereas the Sun said students were victims of a fraud perpetrated by both sides, The Globe opens its editorial with the following: “In the midst of a recession, tens of thousands of young people looking to further their education are being held hostage by the country’s most well-paid teaching assistants, who are unwilling to accept a pay increase beyond what most workers expect in the current climate. The interests of organized labour have overtaken those of students. York University has now been shut down for 11 weeks only because of the needs of striking teaching assistants, graduate assistants and contract workers.”
The Globe says that “the university’s initial offer of a 9.25 per cent pay hike over three years was reasonable; its revised offer, which tacked on additional benefits and wages, was better.” The Globe also notes that the union is trying to strengthen its hand in the future by pushing for a two-year deal (instead of past three year deals) that would expire in 2010, at the same time as many other collective bargaining agreements. “That strategy,” writes the Globe, “should be an incentive to Dalton McGuinty, the Ontario Premier, to draw his own line in the sand. Forced to wade into the dispute this week after months of steering clear, Mr. McGuinty appointed mediator Reg Pearson to “bang a few heads together.” But the time for mediation is over. To discourage CUPE from shutting down more campuses when it can, the Premier should heed the Opposition’s calls to promptly legislate an end to the strike.”
Why was William Ayers turned back at the border?
A bad decision—but the former terrorist isn’t exactly an innocent victim
As reported earlier today (including here), U.S. education professor William Ayers, who was to give a speech in Toronto, has been denied entry to Canada. As our own blogger (and Memorial University education professor) Dale Kirby points out, the decision by Canada Border Services Agency to turn Ayers back at the border is “ridiculous.” Ayers, who is old enough to enjoy the seniors discount and is a professor of education at a major U.S. university, is no threat to the peace and security of Canada. The man may have a violent past—he first career was as a terrorist, as well get into in a moment—but the only bombs he’s coming to Canada to throw are rhetorical. He should of course be let across the border to give his lecture on education policy, or whatever else he wants to talk about.
But it’s worth remembering, before we run off and canonize Ayers as a martyr for the cause of free speech, that the man used to be a real-life bomb thrower. He used to be a terrorist. That fact is not unconnected to why he was denied access to Canada. He used to be one of America’s most wanted men. He was a founder of the Weather Underground, an organization of well-to-do radicals who planned and committed bombings, robberies and murders in the 1970s; he was once a fugitive from justice; he was a close associate of people given life sentences for their part in the murder of police officers. Ayers was involved in bombing both the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. (Due to prosecutorial misconduct back in the ’70s, the most serious charges against him were dropped; the same was not the case for many of his associates). Some may find his record romantic; the audience for his Toronto event, when it eventually takes place, will likely be primarily made up of such people. The people he and his friends robbed, assaulted and killed surely have other ideas. (But they, alas, don’t have Ph.Ds).
The Weather Underground were, fortunately, almost as good at accidentally blowing themselves up as killing cops, soldiers and capitalists; in 1970, three members of the Underground, including Ayers’ girlfriend, blew themselves up while assembling a nail bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse. They were apparently planning to attack a soldier’s dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Ayers, who went on to become an education professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has never exactly disowned this past, instead offering half-baked regrets and evasive excuses for the activities of the Weather Underground, including claiming that they weren’t terrorists because they attacked symbols and property, not people. And even that isn’t entirely true: in his autobiography, Ayers admits involvement in robbings and muggings (to fund the Weathermen’s activities). Though as Slate magazine’s review of Fugitive Days noted, “Ayers reminds his readers that he’s had to omit or change many facts throughout his narrative because they describe actions on his part that are, well, illegal.” The pages and pages of evasions left the reviewer wondering “if he’s ever read a memoir quite so self-indulgent and morally clueless.”
You get a sense of why the Republican party worked so hard last year to link Ayers to Barack Obama: Ayers not only symbolizes a nightmarish era in American history, he was one of its primary causes. The giddy rage and lust for blood in the streets that fringe groups like the Weathermen represented was understandably terrifying to most Americans; Americans wanted the Vietnam war to end, they didn’t want an outbreak of murderous chaos at home. Fear and backlash against the chaos were instrumental in Richard Nixon winning two electoral landslides. (The revolutionaries were scarier than Nixon. Much scarier. If you want to get a flavour of what it was like to live in that time, as the world was falling apart and the proudly insane were having a run at taking over, read this novel.)
Should Ayers be allowed to speak in Toronto? Of course. It might be fascinating. I hope he will address his past. Even if he doesn’t, I want to hear him. Ideas are no threat to Canada.
There is a good argument to be made that, like his associates Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Ayers once upon a time deserved a long spell behind bars. (Gilbert remains in prison for the murder of a Brinks guard and two police officers in 1981; Boudin was convicted of the same and paroled in 2003.) But that was a matter for the U.S. justice system, and it never successfully prosecuted him. For all I know, all these years later, he may even have some worthwhile educational ideas. He’s no threat, not anymore. But he’s no hero. Not then, not now.
Another university president without a Ph.D.
Acadia’s new president continues a trend at Canadian universities
Acadia today announced that it has named Ray Ivany as its new president. Ivany has a long record as an academic administrator: he served as a vice-president at what was then the University College of Cape Breton (which has since transformed into Cape Breton University); he headed Nova Scotia Community College for nearly a decade; he is currently Chair of the Workers’ Compensation Board of Nova Scotia, and also sits on the boards of the Canadian Council on Learning, the Halifax Prior Learning Assessment Centre, and the Leading Edge Endowment Fund B.C. Regional Innovation Chair program. As an administrator of large organizations, Ivany has a distinguished track record. But one thing he doesn’t have is a Ph.D. Ivany is not an academic.
This makes Ivany part of an growing trend in academia. The position of university president—which used to be given to a distinguished professor—is now often going to someone who has made a career as a manager, not a researcher. Most other sectors of the economy long ago moved to this model: to become CEO of an airline, you don’t have to spend 20 years piloting 747s; to run a telecom company, you don’t have to spend a lifetime becoming your company’s most experienced telephone line installer; to run a TV network, you don’t have be a professional camera operator or have hosted your own TV show. What’s more, a university president is not only the manager of a large organization, he or she is managing an organization more decentralized than almost any other. Employees (professors) have an extremely high degree of autonomy (not to mention tenure), as do the various departments and schools within the university. The job requires managerial talents that are often more akin to politics than traditional, private-sector management. And a large and growing part of the president’s job is fund-raising: another unusual skill that combines elements of politics, salesmanship, vision and innate charm. None of these attributes is likely to be developed by spending most of one’s life conducting experiments and writing papers.
Hence the growing trend to look outside the academy. Ottawa last year chose as president former lawyer and politician Allan Rock. Also last year, Bishop’s installed as principal Michael Goldbloom, a lawyer who has had careers leading a lobby group (Alliance Quebec), running the Montreal YMCA, as a newspaper executive (with the Montreal Gazette and Toronto Star), and, from 2007 to 2008, as a vice-president at McGill. The University of Winnipeg is headed by a politician, Lloyd Axworthy. He has a Ph.D. but is not a career academic. The same goes for the chief at St. Francis Xavier, Sean Riley. He has a Ph.D., but his career prior to becoming president was spent in government and the private sector, not as a professor.
On the other hand, to be a university president, you need to have an intimate understanding of what a university is, and what its employees do. You have to be able to relate to them, and they have to be able to relate to you. Unlike private sector managers, university presidents are not really the boss of their organizations. But as a university president, you have a number of bosses, including, to some extent, the professors (who are not your “employees”. Not really.) It’s a very unusual situation. Even people who have spent years as professors inside the system sometimes forget the dynamics of the relationship, once they make it to the top. (See Larry Summers, one of the world’s leading economist, a former Treasury secretary and the appointee to head Barak Obama’s National Economic Council. He spent five years as president of Harvard, from 2001 to 2006, but was ultimately run out of office by the faculty).
Acadia is one of Canada’s oldest and most respected small liberal arts universities, but the last few years have brought serious challenges. It has spent ambitiously, but enrolment has not kept up with those ambitions. It is located in a part of the country that is facing a precipitous drop in its university-aged population. Like its peers, it has no choice but to market itself aggressively among high school students beyond its region. What’s more, the last president, Gail Dinter-Gottlieb, served through two faculty strikes, and resigned the presidency many months before her contract was up.
Last month, before his appointment, Ivany spoke at Acadia about his vision for the university’s future. There appears to have been considerable enthusiasm for him and his ideas. You can read a summary here.
Iggy, that’s a great idea
Ignatieff’s excellent proposal: university funding should follow students across provincial borders
From the Halifax Chronicle Herald’s Q&A with Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff:
Q: Post-secondary funding goes to where the student comes from rather than where the student goes to school. Would you change that if you had the chance?
A: I think we should. It won’t be easy because provinces from which the students originate will make a claim that it should stay with them. But I think we ought to encourage and reward the universities that actually attract students from out of province, and there’s a nation-building reason for that. It’s not merely (that) you want to reward Atlantic Canada for having good universities, but you also want to give Canadians, young Canadians, a national experience.
One of the things that builds a nation is, you know, if someone is born in Ontario, spends some time in Atlantic Canada, someone in Atlantic Canada spends some time out in Calgary. So we ought to have a financing system that incentivizes that, that encourages (us) to create a generation of Canadians that have national experience.
Provinces like Nova Scotia get the short end of the stick in the current system. The province has such a strong network of successful universities that it attracts thousands of students from across the country — but instead of that being a success story, it’s a budgetary problem for Nova Scotia. Why? Because when a B.C. student goes to school at St. Francis Xavier or Dalhousie, B.C.’s higher education tax dollars (and federal dollars transfered to BC) don’t follow that student. The government of Nova Scotia, a net importer of students, ends up footing the bill. As a result, Nova Scotia’s most successful industry—higher education—is a drain on the province’s budget and a perennial problem. The system’s upside down.
This idea of having funding follow university students has been around for decades. I was advocating it way back in the last century, when I was writing Globe and Mail editorials. But it’s never had a chance to grow tired. It’s never been tried.
Reboot!
Is it 2009 already? A look back at what we at Maclean’s OnCampus were up to in 2008
Time to restart this blog. Finally. You get busy with one project, and then another…. and before you know it, your blog’s last time stamp is from last summer.
So what have we been up to here at the Maclean’s higher education workshop? Over the past year, we:
* Launched a new website (that would be this one).
* Held our first annual student recruitment fair, the Maclean’s OnCampus Virtual Fair. (It’s still available on demand until the end of this month), and thousands registered to take part.
* Published our largest-ever edition of the Maclean’s University Rankings issue. (The issue is still on newsstands until the end of the month; online, you can get some of the rankings data here.)
* Put out our third annual University Student issue, containing student survey results from most of Canada’s universities. (Check out those results here). In 2008, we also finally started to expand our coverage of that other half of the Canadian higher education landscape—colleges—giving them a growing section on the website, featuring student survey results from more than 150,000 college students and grads in Ontario and B.C.
* Introduced new sections to the website, such as Student Finance.
* Looking for money for school? We launched a growing database of university and college awards, bursaries and scholarships. The Scholarship Finder search engine contains several thousand awards—and we’re just days away from pushing the button on a dramatic expansion of the database.
* Published our second annual professional schools issue, including our exclusive ranking of Canada’s law schools.
* And published our 13th annual edition of the Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities. (which you can buy on newsstand, or online here.). Since it’s inception, the Guide has sold over 350,000 copies.
Other editorial highlights include:
* Joey Coleman’s fine coverage of the York strike.
* The disclosure of university presidents’ contracts, including some juicy benefits for departing chief execs. (Notably the outgoing president of McMaster and his mysterious 14-year, $99,999 per year golden handshake—$1 less than the amount that must be disclosed under Ontario public sector compensation rules. Big tip of the hat to the Hamilton Spectator for spending months pursuing McMaster and this story through access to information law.)
* The Shinerama debacle at Carleton.
What’s coming for 2009? That’s my next post…..
Yes, there will be shrinkage
Ask any accountant or business analyst: the juicy material in annual reports and corporate filings is usually not what you see headlined on the first page of the document. It’s generally buried. Or hiding in plain sight. So it is with the recently released annual actuarial report on the Canada Student Loans Program. The report [...]
Ask any accountant or business analyst: the juicy material in annual reports and corporate filings is usually not what you see headlined on the first page of the document. It’s generally buried. Or hiding in plain sight. So it is with the recently released annual actuarial report on the Canada Student Loans Program. The report is built on the rather newsworthy but largely overlooked assumption that Canadian university and college enrolment will start shrinking as of next year, and go right on shrinking steadily, all the way to 2026. By the time the great contraction is done, Canadian campuses will have 18% fewer full-time students. The audit was performed by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, or OSFI, a federal oversight agency.
The Star was the only major media source to pick up and run a story on the CSLP report. But The Star focussed, not surprisingly, on CSLP’s first order of business, namely student loans. The actuaries expect that tuition will rise 3% faster than the rate of inflation, such that average full-time tuition in 2031 will be $19,000, up more than 200% from this year. And the CSLP program will, as a result, become larger and more expensive, with more students requiring loans, and with average loan amount growing larger. A little over one-third of Canadian student rely on CSL loans now; by 2031, the report estimates that slightly more than one-half of students will be taking out a CSL loan to help pay for higher education.
But the bigger story, with a rather significant impact on the post-secondary sector and the country, went largely ignored. The auditors expect full-time, Canadian post-secondary enrolment—which has been climbing for a couple of generations—to peak next year at 985,000. Student numbers, the auditors assume, will then slowly but steadily fall until 2026, when Canada will have 805,000 post-secondary students. That’s a drop of 180,000 students or 18.3%. How big is that? This big: It’s equivalent to shutting down every public university in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.
(Not something I’d recommend; just trying to give a sense of the magnitude of decline in student numbers that OSFI is talking about. Note that these post-secondary enrolment numbers include both colleges and universities; presumably both colleges and universities will see enrolment drop. So don’t start selling off the U Calgary campus to real estate developers just yet).
OSFI’s actuaries are just the latest debating squad to join the “Canadian universities: growing or shrinking?” debate. We’ve seen the Council of Ontario Universities, the lobby group for Ontario’s universities, predict massive enrolment growth in the province over the coming decade. The four universities in the Greater Toronto Area last year similarly said that they were bursting at the seams, and the future would bring so many new students that the city would need another university. At the same time, however, the Maritimes Higher Education Commission said that universities in Atlantic Canada could see enrolment shrink by 14 per cent in the near future, because the number of young people in Atlantic Canada is falling. Last year, the Millennium Scholarship Foundation and Statistics Canada similarly noted that the pool of university-age (and college-age) Canadians is about to shrink sharply. Absent a substantial increase in participation rates—the percentage of young people in higher education—that should spell many thousands of fewer students at Canada’s colleges and universities. The fact that OSFI’s actuaries have joined this debate unwittingly, and from a position of disinterest—they’re just financial institution supervisors, trying to understand whether the CSL program will remain solvent in years to come—is a powerful argument in favour of taking their conclusions seriously. They aren’t biased one way or the other.
Waterloo engineering dean’s textbook is best-seller
“Microelectronic Circuits” hits 1 million sales; is used by 80 per cent of all engineering students
Adel Sedra, Waterloo’s dean of engineering, was presented last Saturday with the one-millionth copy of his textbook, “Microelectronic Circuits,” at a special ceremony during the university’s convocation.
Sedra and his co-author, University of Toronto emeritus professor Kenneth C. Smith, published the first edition in 1982. It is now used by 8 out of 10 students worldwide studying microelectronics, according to an article in The Record of Waterloo, and has been translated into nine languages.
Not many Canadian academics (or many academics from anywhere) can claim such a high level of international success and influence.
New Brunswick’s information is free!
N.B. becomes latest province to impose access to info law on universities. Let us count the benefits
Finally. New Brunswick has announced that it is becoming the latest province to subject its universities to provincial freedom of information law. Each of the provinces and the federal government have long had such legislation, covering the affairs of publicly-funded bodies such as government ministries and departments, and various taxpayer-supported institutions such as universities and colleges. New Brunswick is one of the few provinces to exempt public universities and colleges from access to information’s purview, though it was until recently in good company: Ontario only extended its freedom of information legislation to higher education in 2006.
Access to information legislation isn’t perfect. It doesn’t magically make government transparent. It doesn’t even guarantee that information that by law must be made public, will be made public, or at least not with any urgency. As we on the Maclean’s higher education beat have found—led by Sandy Farran, who has been in charge of all of our many freedom of information requests—a law mandating that requested information be released in a timely manner can still yield a delay of the better part of a year. As every good lawyer learns, there’s the law and then there’s procedure, and a public agency that wants to keep information under wraps has a quiver filled with ways to delay and delay some more. But at the end of the day (or at the end of weeks and months), an institution that has received an access request usually has no choice but to disclose the sought-after data or documents to journalists or members of the public, subject to a few reasonable exemptions such as not breaching an individual’s privacy.
So has anything good ever come out of subjecting universities to access to information law? Yes, indeed. The system works. Not perfectly, not quickly, but slowly and surely and generally well enough. Since 2006, Maclean’s has been publishing student satisfaction and engagement surveys from nearly every university in Canada. All of these surveys were conducted by the universities themselves, and until Maclean’s began asking to publish them, these were for university administrators’ eyes only. At most universities, students were surveyed, but only university administrators—not students themselves, or potential students, or alumni, or taxpayers— got to see the full results of those surveys. (Though many institutions did sprinkle a selection of their most flattering findings in their marketing materials. It was about as close to full disclosure as the average profile photo on Lavalife).
And then in 2006, Maclean’s started asking for the results of two major national surveys: the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium (CUSC). Both NSSE and CUSC ask standardized questions across a variety of campuses (CUSC in Canada, NSSE in both the U.S. and Canada), giving readers a sense of what undergrads think of their respective universities, and, in the case of NSSE, how such important benchmarks as the level of student-faculty interaction compare from campus to campus. A few universities, to their credit, had long made this information public. Others made it public as soon as we asked for it. But for the majority of Canadian universities, access to information law was the prod that set this information free. Back in 2006, some universities frankly admitted to us that they’d rather keep these surveys under wraps, because some results revealed real weaknesses at their institutions. But despite the desire to keep these surveys as their little secret, they would concede what we both knew: that if we asked for them and invoked the law, they’d eventually have to turn them over. And so, conceding the legally inevitable, most universities made their results public without a struggle.
A few universities tried to fight or ignore our requests; in the spring, 2006 University Student Issue, we published NSSE and CUSC results for two dozen schools —but could say only “Refused to make this information public” when it came to NSSE results for Windsor, York and New Brunswick and CUSC results for Concordia, Dalhousie, Lakehead, Manitoba, U de Montreal, Mount Saint Vincent, Saint Mary’s, Saskatchewan, U of T Scarborough, Windsor and York.
“As of June 16,” we wrote back in 2006, “results for half of the universities to which we filed FIPPA [an acronym often used to described a freedom of information request; FIPPA stands for "freedom of information and protection of privacy"] requests had been provided to Maclean’s, either by the universities or by a FIPPA coordinator. The remaining requests are still making their way through the legal process. When CUSC and NSSE results for the missing schools are made public, Maclean’s will be publishing them and posting them on our website.”
Five months later, we republished those student survey results as part of the annual University Rankings issue. Thanks to FIPPA, the results for only two schools were still missing in November, 2006: Concordia and New Brunswick. A few months later we had received Concordia’s results, thanks to provincial freedom of information law: the university turned them over the day before we were to have a hearing before the province’s information commissioner.
In the spring of 2007, the only school that refused to make public it’s previous year’s CUSC or NSSE survey results was York. But by last fall it too had conceded and released its data. This past February, the University of Manitoba was the only university to withhold its student survey results. But the province of Manitoba has a freedom of information law and it applies to universities, so we expect to be receiving —and publishing—those results soon.
Eureka, it works.
