Ian Bushfield has posted a comparison of the U of A’s budget to Simon Fraser University’s, and some potential solutions to the university’s supposed budget problems.

One thing he points out is that provincial funding has actually been increasing as a proportion of the budget, but the money has been going to projects in the capital fund (i.e. new buildings). These are what should be affected by provincial cuts, not the general operating budget.

If the university administration cut down on expansion - and on their own exorbitant salaries - they wouldn’t need to shove students down and take their milk money.

Here’s a special bonus add-on to my post on graphing the University of Alberta’s finances:

This morning I discovered (thanks to a post by Ian Bushfield) that not only are “market modifiers” (a pretty term for “massive increases”) to engineering tuition going through, the Engineering Students’ Society is endorsing them!

The usual excuses are made, and I’m perfectly willing to accept that there is nothing that the ESS could have done about this. What leverage do they have? The only possible result of negotiations was to present the Faculty’s decision as a fait accompli.

The ESS may have to accept this, but we don’t.

This is not just an issue for engineering undergrads. Grad students at the U of A have already seen other “market modifier” proposals, and at the University of Calgary, students in business, education, engineering, law and medicine are affected by similar fees.

If we can’t depend on the ESS (or other official groups) to work effectively against tuition increases, then we can’t depend on them to make sure this money is spent properly, either. We need a society for engineering students (and all students) that actually involves the students it claims to represent, and uses the power that only an angry mob can generate.

I’ve published income and expenditure graphs for 2000-2008 for all Canadian universities and colleges. Read on for background information and analysis of the University of Alberta’s graphs.

Background

In the face of provincial government budget cuts and bad investments, the University of Alberta is looking for more money. The government prevents them from raising tuition faster than inflation, so they’re planning a new $550 student fee, and “market modifiers” that will do nasty things to the tuition of students in professional programs.

So where is the money going? This is the question asked by a Maclean’s article written in January. Based on the Financial Information of Universities and Colleges (FIUC, an annual report published by the Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO)), it paints a grim picture for undergraduates across Canada. As tuition has risen over the last 20 years, the proportion of budgets allocated to instruction has dropped, while the proportion allocated to administration and research has risen.

I and other Student Worker Action Group (SWAG) members resolved to take a look at what FIUC could tell us about the U of A. Since the source databases are available from CAUBO, it was relatively simple to generate graphs for all institutions in the dataset. (See the full graphs for the University of Alberta, or continue reading for the highlights.)

Income

The proportion of total income going into the general operating budget (the fund used for instruction, libraries, student services - the things that we undergraduates care about) has dropped significantly:

Tuition has decreased as a percentage of the general operating budget, but other student fees have risen accordingly:

Apparently the University needs better investment advice:

The investment loss in 2002-03 is more than 10% of the entire budget! The university also blames investment losses for its projected deficit. Why is the university so dependent on investment?

Expenditure

Less off the general operating budget is being spent on professors, and more is being spent on benefits and non-instruction staff:

Looking at the entire budget, the university appears to be outsourcing more and more of its work; the proportion of the budget spent on externally contracted services has more than doubled:

And the actual dollar amount has quadrupled, from $13 million to $53 million.

My favorite graph is this one, produced from the FIUC data, the university’s financial reports, and projection of fee growth rates:

The university’s income from tuition has risen steadily, as has the expenditure allocated for instruction. Fair enough (but note that the tuition line does not include the hefty “market modifiers” that have been proposed).

The combined salaries of the university’s president and vice-presidents (the purple line) have more than tripled in the past decade.

The red line (and its projection) is the university’s per-student income from non-tuition student fees. (Note that this does not include fees collected for other agencies, e.g. the U-Pass or the SU health plan). Including the new $550 fee for 2010-11, non-tuition student fees will have almost quadrupled.

Conclusions

I’m no expert (and my eyes are tired and sore), so I invite you to draw your own conclusions. There may be further insights hidden in the full graphs.

It’s clear that government limitations on tuition have driven the university to seek other ways to extract money from students. The new fee is simply a particularly blatant example of this.

Students should not be treated as the university’s personal piggy bank, to be turned upside down and shaken whenever a bad investment leaves the university scrambling for cash.

These figures would be even less pleasant if they included FIUC data going back to the 80s.

What should we do about it? The march to the legislature on the 18th is a start, but I’m doubtful of the effectiveness of one-off protests. Past evidence suggests that our representatives in the Students’ Union have little power to affect university decisions on these matters. Those of us with the Student Worker Action Group are discussing ways to confront the university directly, but this can only work once we’ve built a broad base of support.

(A much lesser issue is that we should pressure our university to publish this data in consistent machine-readable forms so that this kind of analysis is easier. I have spent a ton of time on this, I hope you get something out of it.)

I bike everywhere I go. I’ve got a Peugeot that’s older than me that I’ve converted to a fixed-gear. Great in the summer, but after November it gets a bit more complicated.

Everybody at work is impressed that I’m still commuting without a motor. It’s not easy; this picture describes biking in Edmonton pretty well:

The weather hates you, the city hates you, and (most importantly) drivers hate you. Good times!

Snowfall and shitty roads complicate things. The roads are very slippery, I broke my left pedal by falling (unfortunately you can’t see how cool the crystals in the metal look):

The Edmonton Bicycle Commuters have instructions for making studded tires from knobby tires and metal screws. I picked up a(n outrageously expensive) tire at United Cycle, punctured some holes in it with an awl, stuck some screws through it and ended up with this:

Stuck an old tube between the tube and the tire to prevent too much rubbing. Much less slippy, and enough to get me to work without crippling injuries.

I’ve only done my front tire. My back tire skids all over the place and my knuckles are white but I manage to stay upright. I’ve earned the right to laugh at cars spinning out at intersections. Learn to drive!

Bikes: good transportation or best transportation? Discuss.

I wanted to do something creative today, so I scraped IMDB and wrote a program to do some basic analysis of the actors in the top 250 movies. (You won’t see the cool graphs unless you’re using a cool browser.) Nothing too interesting turns up. More recent movies are more popular than older ones. There’s an odd peak in the histogram of popular movies that occurs around 1957. The top actors are all men, to a rather shocking extent.

(Note that the data is not live, and probably won’t be updated after this is posted on 2009-11-08.)

Other things I did today: made some spicy fried tofu, watched freaky movies (1, 2, 3, 4) and read several months of I Blame the Patriarchy. A good day (except that tomorrow is Monday, and that the hair salon was closed).

You have every right to say or do whatever you want. And you’re right — political correctness is totally stifling those who want to use racist epithets against minorities or who want to use sexist presentations to make a technical point. Here’s what I recommend: Get louder and more intrusive with your non-political-correctness. In fact, make the use of sexist and offensive commentary an even more intrinsic part of the fabric of the technologies you create. Regale complete strangers with the fact that you can’t distinguish between “pictures of naked women” and “an atmosphere that’s hostile to participation”.

Because if you aren’t willing to concede that technology is better when it’s inclusive, or you’re not willing to read the most thoughtful and heartfelt discussions of what it takes to be inclusive, and if you’re determined to respond to anything that offends your position of privilege, then maybe the best thing you can do is to make explicitly clear that the technology you create has the same insular, exclusionary values that you do.

Source.

I’ve always assumed that the Free/open source community is pretty inclusive, but investigation into the proportions of women involved suggests otherwise. I wonder what they look like for other minority groups :(.

This message was posted to nepomuk-kde@semanticdesktop.org (a mailing list about a piece of software that I’m interested in) today:

Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 13:23:50 -0400

From: Alan Grimes agrimes@xxxxxxxxx.net

Subject: [nepomuk-kde] OUTRAGEOUS!!!! =|

I’ve decided to begin and end my brief tenure on this mailing list with a flame addressed to all of you fags who decided to fuck up KDE by ramming your gay little buzzwords into the very core of what I rely upon daily to get my work done.

[…]

If this were just a research project, It would be impossible for me to complain. Truly, one of the most manly things one can do with a computer is try to invent new ways of doing things. […] You cross the line when you adulterate the kernel of the KDE project with useless, unproven, example of computational faggotry.

[…]

Why in god’s name would I want a “social desktop” when my fucking computer contains more personal information about me than my own brain?? That’s insane!!! I mean I am seriously considering trying to find alternatives for all of the kde applications I use all day long just so that I won’t be living under the threat that the “social desktop” will be sharing my password files (or even more damning information!) to anyone and everyone. This may be paranoia but what evidence do I have? I have a bunch of buzzwords talking about how wonderful it is to share information with co-workers when I have no friends and work alone! =(

[…]

What’s more, I’ve never once encountered a hetereosexual who was even half so enthuseastic about pressing forward with these buzzwords as the kool-aid drinkers on this site. I wish the homosexuals could find a way to satisfy themselves in their bedrooms (or in each other’s bedrooms, I really couldn’t care less.) and not spread it out like an ooze across the whole of the world. =\

[T]hings I desperately need are being neglected in favor of things that I don’t even want, and that’s an outrage! =(

The confusion of the technical (I don’t agree with/understand/like your technical decisions) with the personal (you monster, how dare you do things that way!).

The inexplicable combination of egomania (if I don’t understand it it must be pointless) and self-pity (announcing to a bunch of total strangers that you have no friends).

The complete lack of perspective, the ridiculous paranoia, and the insistence that people work on the things that are important to him.

The way he’s applying his homophobia is a bit baffling to me, but the homophobia itself is not particularly surprising.

He’s even managed to mix in a bit of sexism (research is “manly”).

This kind of shit is far too common amongst people who are interested in computers, engineering, etc. I need new hobbies (and maybe a new career).

I’ve thrown away the second revision of the system that runs this journal. Its replacement is much simpler; I’ve gone from about 1300 lines of Ruby and 1000 lines of XSLT to 252 lines of Ruby and 194 lines of XSLT. It does a lot less - no AtomPub, no live XPath searches - but I doubt anybody will notice.

The idea is to store everything in git. When I’m ready to publish new entries or updates I can git push to a special repository. The repository has a post-update hook that transforms the entries into Atom, then runs the Atom through XSLT to create the final static XHTML and HTML files.

It was a bit of a pain to get set up; git push is a bit of a black art, and lighttpd doesn’t support content negotiation on its own. It seems to be holding together ok, though. Hopefully this new simplicity will encourage me to write more. If you’re intrigued, you can get your own sloth-log clone.

This entry also marks a total migration to my new server. May it never be forced to limp like its predecessor.