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Category: Blogs

The Fifteen: May 9, 2025

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of The Fifteen. We track research funding shake-ups in Brussels’ ERC “supergrants” and a defence-focused tweak to Horizon Europe. Meanwhile, higher education resources continue to be stretched thin: half of UK universities are axing courses under financial duress, and US public colleges face a looming crisis driven by proposed cuts to Medicaid. We look at student union leaders’ fight with their predecessors, now turned politicians, and track Labour’s big win in Australia. Finally, a set

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May 9, 2025 No Comments

Banking on Human Capital: How RBC Sees the Future of Talent, Innovation, and the Role of Post-Secondary Institutions

Canada’s heading into some pretty choppy waters in 2025. For a century or so, we’ve had a one track economic strategy, closer integration with the United States. Now, the Trump administration with its faith in tariffs as an instrument of both power and corruption, has essentially nuked that strategy, at least as far as the trading goods is concerned. There’s a lot of change coming to Canada, and it’ll be costly. In much the same way that diplomatic evolution and

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May 8, 2025 1 Comment

Probably not the next Laurentian, but…..

As I noted yesterday, there are only two institutions in Canada which have run deficits in each of the last five years: St. Thomas University (STU) and Vancouver Island University (VIU). In both instances, these institutions have had deficits averaging between 4 and 5% of their total income over the course of those five years. By any definition, this puts them on some kind of watch list. As Figures 1 and 2 show, the root cause of both institutions’ problems

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May 7, 2025 2 Comments

Post-COVID University Surpluses (Deficits)

Ok, everyone, buckle up. For I have been looking at university financial statements for 2023-24 and the previous few years, and I have Some Thoughts. In this exercise, I examined the financial statements from 2017-18 onwards for the 66 Canadian universities which are not federated with a larger institution and had income over $20 million. L’Université du Québec was excluded from the analysis below because it has yet to release financial statements for 2023-24. Figure 1 shows the average net

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May 6, 2025 1 Comment

Opportunity and Talent

On the day of the federal election, the Globe came out with a list of eight “fateful issues” that Canada’s next Prime Minister (Mark Carney, as we now know) would have to face. I’ve read it a couple of times now and what strikes me most is not that the list is wrong, per se, but that the framing is so desperately plodding and unimaginative. And we need some serious imagination right now. Let’s get down to specifics here: the eight areas

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May 5, 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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