Scholar Dollars

Posted February 8, 2010

Taxpayers contribute over $300,000,000 per year to universities. Do you ever wonder what you get for that money? Government demands remarkably little from the universities in the way of accountability.

It is revealing that only one of the Department of Education’s seven goals concerns itself with post secondary education. It addresses issues of funding and tuition, and number of participants.

There is no effort to address questions of quality or relevance of the research and education provided by the universities.Join the conversation on Universities…

Comments of all kinds are welcome. Here are some questions on which we would particularly like to hear:

  1. Did you graduate from a Nova Scotia university or the NSCC?
  2. Has the education you received been valuable to your employment?
  3. Do you have experience of university research making a useful contribution to your work or community?
  4. Do you feel that universities deliver value for money?
  5. Do you live in a university community? If so do you feel that it adds to the community’s vitality and culture?

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Reference Material

Scholar Dollars

Ontario Higher Education Commission

Pathway to Rural Regeneration: Transforming Small Schools into Community Hubs

Letter from Karen Casey – Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development

Agreement Between The Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development of the Province of Nova Scotia and The Nova Scotia Teachers Union

Nova Scotia’s Action Plan for Education: Final Report – Students First

Nova Scotia’s Action Plan for Education: Raise the Bar

More Information on Collective Agreements

Acadia University

Dalhousie University

Saint Mary’s University

St. Francis Xavier University

Related Topics URLs

Bleak Prospects for Teachers

http://arts.dal.ca/Research/

http://science.dal.ca/RESEARCH/

http://www.stfx.ca/academics/research/

http://www.msvu.ca/en/home/research/msvuresearch/default.aspx

http://fgsr.smu.ca/research.html

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Most Recent Comments

  • I might be beating a dead horse, but thank you for ptosing this!

    Doc | July 8, 2011

  • After 40 years teaching in the Nova Scotia Tech university system I believe that a fair percentage of the students would be better off with a community college education. Some will mature and shine in that system and they will be able to proceed to university professional engineering status if they feel the need to a higher level. Some of my best engineering students were technician and technology graduates who brought a wealth of practical experience to the university setting. And I can say that everyone who took this route has been a very successful engineer and has contributed tremendously to the economy of the province. We have played down the importance of the trades and technology graduates and many students end up in university because their parents have been led to believe that the only path to success is through the university. As a Civil Engineering Faculty Advisor I often had to assess the cause of failure with marginal students. It usually was poor performance in the theoretical courses. Many of these I advised to transfer to technology programs – and several later thanked me for the advise. My motto was that it is much more fulfilling to be a good technician/technologist than a second rate engineer.

    Ron Gilkie | January 10, 2011

  • I just find it frustrating that a $10,000 cost for a short years education is still accepted. Go to NSCC get a full year learning adn finish in less years. If Universities actually taught for a full education year we could reduce teh # of years and that would help offset the full cost of a degree program. Now as for all the employee issues like wages, benefits, pensions, tenure etc I just wish there was a way the pay and benefits were indexed to performance and enrolement. Maybe if a prof has a class with 30% failure/dropout rates they get a years pension knocked off or get a poor perf eval and no raise or get their research right suspended etc so they have incentive to focus on their prime reason for them being there. Or maybe we incent for their class having higher enrollment. I think we need to go through a wake up phase of getting the “system” to start focusing on getting good results vs just not wanting to generate any waves. We may need this phase of negative awakening before we can get back to the positive reinforcement as I fear if we try the positive reinforcement first it could just feed the entitlement expectation. Anyway I know these things are much more complex than any of us can assess and fix on a blog but at least it gets a perspective that is needed out to more folks.

    blair | January 10, 2011

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