Hi all. Our budget commentary is now up and available here. This was a difficult budget to evaluate. By no stretch of the imagination can it be called an “education budget,” and some of it seems to have been thrown together; yet at the same time some of the changes seem quite profound. First, it must be said that there are areas where the Budget is most notable for what it did not do. It did not renew the Business Higher Education
The situation in Ukraine is incredibly bleak. It’s not simply that Russia, led by a seemingly no-longer rational President, is trying to erase the independence of a neighbour; it is rather that it is trying to roll back 30 years of history and re-establish a pre-1989 balance of forces in Eastern Europe. Canada, like the rest of the West, is leaving Ukraine to do the physical fighting on its own for the moment, but the prospects for more direct forms
Just a quick blog today as things are kind of hopping at HESA Towers this week (literally, in the sense that the floor shakes a bit with the new construction). It’s about how to measure revenue in Canadian higher education. Long-time readers are used to me publishing data like that in Figure 1, which shows provincial government expenditure per student. The usual conclusion everyone draws from this graph is “holy cow, Ontario is run by monsters” (to which the answer
Over Xmas, someone asked me on Twitter whether student loans were replacing direct government support as a main source of public assistance. I answered, no, direct government support either from the feds (mainly through research and infrastructure) or the provinces (operating grants), are worth about five times more that the annual value of student loans. To wit, Figure 1. Figure 1: Annual Student Loan Disbursements vs. Total Government Transfers to Post-Secondary Institutions, Canada, 1989-90 to 2019-20, in constant $2019 Millions
Many of my Canadian readers will likely have read a piece that has been circulating on the internet from Kim Siever, a self-described leftist internet journalist from Lethbridge. The headline says it all: UCP Government to Cut Post-Secondary Spending by $1.5 Billion; That Number Rises to $3.5 Billion if you Factor in Inflation and Population Growth. You know how I am always on about Economic Impact Analyses always being forms of competitive counting? Methodologically speaking, this is worse. Ok, so here’s
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