8 Comments
May 13Liked by David Clinton

Wokeism is killing our culture. In every way. Former Liberal here.

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It's killing certain cultural institutions...which, in some cases, might be a good thing. Perhaps we're better off without them. University for the masses it probably one good example.

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May 14Liked by David Clinton

Yes. My smart lawyer father always suggested I pursue a career in the trades. Good honest work, he maintained. 😀

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May 15Liked by David Clinton

If support staff salaries represent under 3% of payroll (and that's probably an overestimate, since they won't get paid as much as teaching staff and administrators), then growth in the proportion of support staff can't explain an approximately 100% increase in tuition.

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You're probably right. And I should have been more clear that support staff hires are a *contributor* to the problem and not the whole story. Nevertheless, if "support staff" includes very highly-paid administrators and assistant deans - the way it does in US colleges - then that 3% might pull a lot more weight.

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According to the definition in your article, support staff includes "educational consultants, student exchange program coordinators, testing services, research and development, guidance counselors, and tutoring and exam preparation services". I don't see how that category, as you've described it, could include administrators and assistant deans.

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There is another important factor that I plan to cover in a follow-up: Ontario's sunshine list contains a large number of university employees (both administrators and professors) earning more than $400,000. I would imagine that salary bloat plays a significant role in all this - and, for Ontario at least, the numbers are available.

Of course, I won't know how significant this is until I properly work through the data.

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6117 seemed to be the only NAICS designation that the Statistics Canada table made available. They seemed to place only teaching staff in 6113: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/cv.action?pid=3710014401

I'm not 100% sure, of course, but it seems possible that something like "educational consultants" can cover a lot of ground.

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