Category Education
Men, women, and the end of mandatory retirement
Back in 2014, I wrote a blog post on the end of mandatory retirement for university professors. I quoted a number of men who argued that having a standard retirement age hurts women. Here's an extract from that original post: Thomas Klassen and David Macgregor, writing in the CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers) Bulletin, challenged […]
Why do I have to collect my pension already?
Ontario's Ford government has a plan to induce professors over 71 to retire. I wrote a column in the Globe and Mail about it. Here's a sneak peak: Nearly one in 10 Ontario university professors is over the age of 65. As of 2016, these professors were earning, on average, $184,947 a year. Moreover, because […]
Guest Post: Comparing Technological Change in the Health and Taxi Industries
Well, here is a guest post forwarded to me by Ruolz Ariste – a colleague whom I originally met during my annual interactions with the CIHI and with whom I have co-authored. Ruolz Ariste is currently pursuing a PhD in Industrial Relations in a program run by run jointly by Université Laval and Université du […]
Breaking up the quarter million dollar club
Ontario eliminated mandatory retirement in 2006. Six years later, professors started to enter the quarter million dollar dollar club. This exclusive group is comprised of university professors aged 71 or older who, due to the curious interaction of federal pension legislation and academic collective agreements, are able to collect a full pension and a full […]
Are education attainment levels the root cause of all good earnings news?
An earlier post noted that the real earnings gains over the past 20 years were as clean an example of a composition effect as you're likely to see. Earnings among full-time workers with a given level of education have shown some modest growth over time, but average earnings growth for all full-time workers has been […]
Learning outcomes: potential game-changer, or worthless bean-counting and cataloguing exercise?
Summary: Harvey Weingarten, President of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, describes learning outcomes as a "game-changer." A report by Richard Shireman argues that setting out learning outcomes has become, in some cases, nothing more than "worthless bean-counting and cataloging." In this extract from the draft version of my CEA Presidential Address, I talk […]
A gnomic theory of higher education
Here are the powerpoint slides (.pdf format) for my CEA Presidential Address "The Political Economy of University Education in Canada": DOWNLOAD WOOLLEY PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SLIDES HERE. The talk will be written up for the November issue of Canadian Journal of Economics, and I'll sketch out some of the main ideas here. Universities do two things. First, […]
Are the returns to university education falling?
[Updated to fix coding errors in some of my graphs.] Prices are determined by supply and demand. The supply of university-educated Canadians, relative to the supply of college or high school graduates, is increasing. University participation rates have been climbing for decades (Source: CAUT): Canada's points based immigration system, which prioritizes those with valuable skills, […]
In the war between generations, will universities get caught in the cross-fire?
Canada's baby boomers are now in their late 50s and 60s. They're done with university. Their kids, for the most part, are done with university. Sure, at some point the boomers' grandchildren might want a university education, but that is not an immediate or pressing concern. More urgent, from the baby boomer's point of view, […]
The evolving gender gap in student satisfaction
For 30 years, Canada's National Graduates Survey (NGS) has asking college and university graduates, "If you could choose again, would you select the same field of study or specialization that you completed?" As I explain here, the precise wording of the "would you do it again" question has changed over time, as has the placement […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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