Hi all. Our budget commentary is now up and available here. This was a difficult budget to evaluate. By no stretch of the imagination can it be called an “education budget,” and some of it seems to have been thrown together; yet at the same time some of the changes seem quite profound. First, it must be said that there are areas where the Budget is most notable for what it did not do. It did not renew the Business Higher Education
One of the less-anticipated outcomes of the COVID pandemic is the return of inflation at levels not seen in nearly thirty years. It is not yet clear if this inflation is something transitory, or something more long-term. The supply-chain snarls of mid-2021 have been followed by inflationary spikes due to rising oil prices and now – with the invasion of Ukraine – major spikes in food prices world-wide. In theory, each of these things is a one-off. But as wages
The Alberta Budget came out last week. As usual, the way Alberta presents its numbers creates enormous confusion and scope for spin, so permit me to run through the numbers with you. Recall from last year’s explainer that in its annual budget, the government runs two sets of numbers on post-secondary education. The first is a straightforward “Expense Vote by Program”: that is to say, what the government is actually spending. The image below shows how that looked in the
Many of my Canadian readers will likely have read a piece that has been circulating on the internet from Kim Siever, a self-described leftist internet journalist from Lethbridge. The headline says it all: UCP Government to Cut Post-Secondary Spending by $1.5 Billion; That Number Rises to $3.5 Billion if you Factor in Inflation and Population Growth. You know how I am always on about Economic Impact Analyses always being forms of competitive counting? Methodologically speaking, this is worse. Ok, so here’s
Yesterday, we examined student income during COVID. On aggregate, income might not have dropped at all once the Canada Education Student Benefit is taken into the equation, though there was probably some re-distribution of money away from students who work summers to those who don’t. Today, I want to look at what happened to institutions in the pandemic, because again the picture painted by the data emerging from institutional financial statements is quite different from the conventional wisdom about what
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.
