Hello all. As usual, HESA Towers has been hard at work to bring you our budget commentary, which is available here.
While there is the odd good news story in here – like more money for applied research in colleges – in the main, this is probably the worst budget for the higher education sector in years. An $800 million year-on-year reduction in money for student grants – long foreshadowed, not by any means a breach of promise (the injection of extra money was never promised to last beyond this July) but a big hit nonetheless. No movement whatsoever on the long-frozen value of graduate/postdoc scholarships, which places Canadian universities at enormous disadvantage when competing for international talent. No change to the granting councils, which means that by next academic year the entirety of the “historic boost” to research funding will have been eroded by inflation. In short, the amount of money leaving the post-secondary sector is significantly higher than the amount going in. By that measure, you would have to go back to 1995 or 1996 to find a budget in which the higher education sector fared worse.
The Liberals are very lucky indeed that their main opposition seems to view higher education simply as a source of culture war memes: absent that, they might have to act like a pro-higher-education party in order to win the higher education vote.
Regardless, the whole higher education sector, particularly Universities Canada and the U-15, probably need a deep re-think of how to lobby this government. What the sector is doing now clearly isn’t working. That work needs to start immediately.
Tweet this post
The value of NSERC, CIHR and SSHRC scholarships and PDFs gets discussed a lot, but it probably receives more attention than it deserves. The value of CGS-M and PGS-D scholarships is indeed too small and has not changed for a long time. But I would argue that the decision by NSERC to eliminate PGS-M scholarships, reducing the overall number of master’s scholarships, and to make them non-renewable, had a much higher negative impact, and I would rectify that before adjusting values.
CGS-D scholarships ($ 35,000) and Vaniers (50,000) are arguably more than adequate to task.
Just as our discovery grants have been for quite some time considered “Grants in aid of research” , recognizing that there is little chance of getting the work done if that were your sole source of funding, it is possible to view graduate scholarships as supporting students without providing their entire stipend – students can still be topped up from supervisors’ grants, receive teaching assistantships, other scholarships etc. Many departments and/or universities have minimum stipends, and those are often higher than the value of PGS-Ds (21,000 right now) – often substantially so.
It should also be recognized that, at least in my world (basic science) only a small minority of students receive try-council scholarships, and increasing the value of those would have little effect on the lives of the vast majority if graduate students. Increasing grant values across the board might be more beneficial.
Finally, the statement that “No movement whatsoever on the long-frozen value of graduate/postdoc scholarships, which places Canadian universities at enormous disadvantage when competing for international talent. ” is completely misguided, since only Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents are eligible for tri-council scholarships and fellowships, with the exception of Vaniers and Bantings (which are rare as hen’s teeth). Universities have it within their power to create high value scholarships and fellowship that are available to international students, if they so choose.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see a huge increase in the number of postgraduate scholarships and PDFs from tricouncil sources, as well as value for the bottom end (CGS-M and PGS-D) increasing substantially, but those steps may not be the most efficient uses of money, and are of little help to international students and their recruitment.
While the value of the CGS-M and PGS-D scholarships are indeed too little, they’re so competitive to land that for the vast majority of graduate students their value is irrelevant since they will never be awarded one. For those who are fortunate to receive one, their value would go much further if universities would stop clawing back the funding the student would otherwise have received less a small “top up” amount. As a result most students who win a CGS-M or PGS-D don’t end up earning much more than they would have without one anyway and it only affords universities the opportunity to enroll additional students at very little cost to themselves instead of increasing the funding available to each one.