Category: Canada

Budget 2023’s Three Key Decisions on Students

There are three student-finance related measures to watch for in the upcoming budget.  One of them concerns graduate research funding and the other two concern student financial aid.  With this Liberal Government, one’d normally think all three decisions would land in favour of “more! more! more!”.  But there are faint signs that this government is starting to grasp that it has a real spending problem, and that makes these three decisions difficult to predict, for whenever the budget actually comes.

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A First Look At 2021 Education Census Data

Last Thursday, the only national statistics agency we’ve got released a batch of data from the 2021 census relating to education.  There is some interesting stuff in there, particularly with respect to the relationship between education and occupation.  I can’t get into all of it here – seems like the kind of thing I could spend most of the holidays fooling around on – but I want to dig into a couple of key pieces of data. Before I get

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One Podcast to Start Your Day-Newfoundland and Labrador

Good morning.  In exciting news, One Podcast to Start Your Day can now be found on all of your favourite podcast apps and includes a RSS feed. This episode, and the two previous ones, can be found here: https://anchor.fm/optsyd. Today we have different version of One Podcast to Start Your Day.  We invited Dale Kirby to our virtual table for a one-on-one discussion of post-secondary education in Newfoundland and Labrador. Dale’s background as a Professor in the Faculty of Education

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The Affordability of Canadian Universities, Part 4

The final objection to the idea I’ve been pushing for the last couple of weeks – namely, that higher education might be getting more affordable (which it is, to some extent, by most tuition-related measures of affordability) – is that tuition-related measures of affordability are in adequate and don’t cover and so do not do justice to the current “the cost of living crisis”.  Broadly, this is true.  But, I suggest, it’s not actually true for everyone, and even for

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The Affordability of Canadian Universities, Part 3

It turns out that a lot of you really hate the idea that Canada might be experiencing some success with respect to affordability in universities.  Critics seem to focus mostly on one of two factors.  I will deal with the first criticism today and leave the second to tomorrow. Let’s start with the time frame issue.  The problem is the availability of data.  Statistics Canada’s current data on student “tuition and fees” only goes back to 2006-07, but with only

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