The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

New Data on Completion Rates

For the last few years, Statscan has been publishing cohort completion data using the Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS).  A new round of data dropped last week, and there were several interesting nuggets for anyone who cared to dive in a little bit behind the headline numbers.  Let’s dive in, shall we? Let’s begin with university undergraduate degrees.  Figure 1 shows the 6-year completion rate for undergraduate degrees in Canada (note, completion here refers to completion of the degree-level in

Read More »
January 19, 2023 No Comments

Consulting

The issue of how governments use consultants is now centre-stage, thanks to Pierre Poilievre and the National Post deciding to go full Maude Barlow on the issue of federal government contracts with McKinsey & Company.  Chatter on twitter suggests that left and right are able to come together around two key issues: first, that having consultants do work means that government is somehow no longer accountable to the public  and second, plaintively asking “why do we need consultants, when public servants

Read More »
January 17, 2023 1 Comment

Cross-Subsidies

One of the most important but least-acknowledged subjects in higher education management and finance is internal cross-subsidies.  So today, I‘m going to demystify it, and then consider how higher education institutions can be more transparent about them. Let’s start with costs per student because that is a bit easier to understand.  Not every student in every class costs the same to educate.  Broadly speaking, for each course or course section, there is a labour cost and a materials cost.  Labour

Read More »
January 16, 2023 2 Comments

Mexican Higher Education and the Lopez Obrador Presidency

Welcome to the first podcast episode of 2023. As you read in Monday’s blog, the format of the podcast will be changing over the next few weeks. We are excited to bring you more stories of higher education from around the globe, including the countries highlighted the World Higher Education Review. While the formatting and branding will be changing, the quality insight our guests bring will not. This week we’re joined by Alma Maldonado-Maldonado of Mexico’s CINEVSTAV as we discuss

Read More »
January 13, 2023 No Comments

College Finances 2020-21

Let’s catch up on some new Statscan data on college finances during COVID.  The big headline can be seen in figure 1:  Total income for colleges dropped by 8.4% in real terms during 2020-21.  About 40% of that fall was due to inflation, the rest was an absolute drop in income.  But break it down by source of income, and you see something different: income from governments was down by 2%, income from student fees by 11%, and income from

Read More »
January 11, 2023 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...