The biggest thing everyone is going to be talking about this year – barring another university doing a surprise Laurentian – is the set of federal cuts coming down the pike. They are big. And they are nasty. So, it’s worth understanding exactly the scale of what is heading in our direction. This is going to be a three-parter. Today, I will talk about the overall size of the cuts to come, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I will talk
So. This is the last blog of the academic year. Service resumes Tuesday, 2 September. It’s been a long year. I’m pretty tired. How about you? This was the year it all kind of came crashing down: not just here in Canda, but everywhere else too. It’s too long to go through and my more faithful readers already know the story. It’s not just in Canada. In France, Australia, and the UK, we saw institutions having similar problems: all these
Ok everyone, all the provincial budgets are in and so it’s time for our annual look at what another round of irresponsible pan-partisan political leadership has wrought for our sector for the next twelve months. Figure 1 shows the province-by-province breakdown of this year’s budgets, showing the change in transfers to institutions in real dollars over 1 year and 5 years for each of the ten provinces. In most provinces, collecting this data is pretty easy—you just look at the
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
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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