Category: Budgets

Comparing Per-Student University Expenditures by Category (2)

This is part 2 of a two-parter on how Canadian universities spend their money.  All the stuff about what data I’m using, caveats thereto, etc., are available in yesterday’s post.  If you missed yesterday, go catch up here. First, two small mea culpas from yesterday.  First, due to a cut/paste error, part of the data on student services that went out yesterday was slightly off, but has now been corrected on the website.  Second, I neglected to mention that the

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Comparing Per-Student University Expenditures by Category (1)

Just for giggles the other day, I took a look at Canadian university expenditures in 2013-14 using (as usual) the CAUBO/Statscan Financial Information of Universities and Colleges Survey.  I looked at operating expenditures by category.  Then I normalized them per FTE student.  And I got some very weird results which I thought I would share with y’all. What I am going to do in this series is show you the results for the main categories of expenditure which are “non-academic”. 

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Are Teaching Costs Increasing at Canadian Universities?

On Wednesday, someone took me to task in the comments section of the blog for part of my analysis on the financial situation of higher education, saying: “The HE sector has hiked tuition up far faster than inflation citing “Increased teaching costs”. They have been unable or unwilling to provide proper costings for this.” Is this true? Well, it depends how long a time-frame you choose to use. Let’s look at the data. To look at “teaching costs”, we need to use

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Situation Critical

So, we haven’t yet got through all the provincial budgets, but it’s crystal clear from those in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, plus the election promises made by the winners/likely winners in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, that there is no chance whatsoever that provincial governments, on aggregate, are going to increase government grants to institutions by an amount equal to inflation.  This will mark the fifth time in the last six years that provincial grants to institutions have lagged inflation.  While provinces

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Who Won and Who Lost in the CSLP Re-Shuffle

(Warning to readers: today’s blog is a long read about student aid policy.  Skip it if this kind of wonkery isn’t to your taste.) Last week’s historic changes to the Canada Student Loans Program – which saw the elimination of the Education and Textbook Tax Credits, and an increase of 50% in Canada Student Grants – is a very complicated piece of policy to analyze.  Remember that there is no new money in this set-up: any new money given to one set

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