The first two big provincial budgets of the year came from British Columbia and Alberta and they could not have been more different. To start out in Victoria, the folks in BC had a nice, tidy, almost do-nothing budget. Grants to institutions rose by 1% – that is, slightly less than inflation – while spending on student aid rose by nearly 23%. Some but not all of that money went to a new “BC Access Grant” which got trumpeted all over the
Let’s take a look at administrative bloat. It’s been about four and a half years since we last did it: time for another look. Now, the typical story we hear about administrative bloat concerns the huge numbers of administrative and support staff (henceforth, “A&S Staff”) hired, in contrast to the ranks of the professoriate, which are constantly decimated by predatory managers and yadda yadda. The second part of that is reasonably easy to de-bunk, as Statistics Canada actually publishes data
Yesterday, I discussed the peculiarities of Alberta’s financial reporting system for post-secondary education and how it reflects the province’s controlling approach towards post-secondary institutions (if you don’t believe me, ask anyone who’s been a senior admin at both an Albertan institution and one from another province, and see how often they get calls from Ministers and senior government officials). Today, I want to talk about how that approach is likely to sabotage the governing United Conservative Party’s goals when it
I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days in Alberta last week, and I would spend some time writing about the ways in which Alberta higher education is structured differently from the rest of the country. For that, I have to get into the public finance weeds. Twenty years ago, Alberta arguably had the best public service in the country (it’s still pretty good, but it’s fallen a bit). One of the innovations they hit on as they
Alberta has long been a fiscal outlier in Canada. It is by some distance Canada’s richest province (in the sense that household incomes per capita are the highest) and its provincial governments—mostly Conservative, but with a New Democrat interlude between 2015 and 2019—have long provided Albertans with public services to match. However, the one thing the Alberta government refuses to do is impose a sales tax or even a particularly imposing regime of personal taxes, preferring instead to ride the
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.
