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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

Fun with Tuition Data

I want to show you something kind of intriguing about how tuition is changing in Canada. By now you might be familiar with a chart that looks like Figure 1, which shows average tuition, exclusive of ancillary fees (which would tack another $900-1000 on to the total), in constant $2024. The story it shows is one of persistent real increases from up until 2017-18, at which point, mainly thanks to policy changes in Ontario, tuition falls sharply and continues to

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September 17, 2025 2 Comments

The Shrinking Research University Business Model

For most of the past 30 or so years, big Canadian universities have all been working off more or less the same business model: find areas where you can make big profits and use those profits to make yourself more research-intensive. That’s it. That’s the whole model. International students? Big profit centres. Professional programs? You better believe those are money-makers. Undergraduate studies – well, they might not make that much money in toto but holy moly first-year students are taken

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September 16, 2025 6 Comments

Born on Third Base

Cast your minds back to January of 2024, when the federal government suddenly decided that housing was an issue, international students were the problem and implemented a complicated and irritating-to-implement set of caps that were 35% lower nationally than for 2023 (and in Ontario significantly more than that). Then, in 2025 came another set of changes including a 10% cut in the national limit. And then, on top of that, a set of new conditions on post-graduate work visas were

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September 15, 2025 7 Comments

The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 3: ISED

Monday, we looked at the country’s overall financial situation (dire), and yesterday we looked at how cuts of a magnitude of 15% might affect key programs like the Canada Education Savings Program and the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program. Today, we’re going to look at how a 15% cut might affect the Government of Canada’s research subsidies, which in the main are run through the Ministry of innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED).  (I will be speaking about “the tri-councils”

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September 10, 2025 2 Comments

The Coming Federal Cuts – Part 2: ESDC

Yesterday, I explained why the federal government now finds itself in a position where it has to cut program budgets by at least 15% just to keep the budget deficit to $50 billion by 2028. Today, I am going to explain how this will play out at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), which plays a major role in funding for skills and education in Canada, mainly through the Canada Education Savings Program (CESP) and the Canada Student Financial Assistance

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September 9, 2025 2 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.

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