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Category: Budgets

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition It’s been a little over five years since I took a serious dive into the question of “administrative bloat,” which apparently exists everywhere but in the statistics. Still, always good to check assumptions every once in a while, and I thought five years was long enough to make a new look at the data worthwhile. So here goes: Let’s start by reviewing what we can and cannot know about staffing at Canadian universities. StatsCan

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March 26, 2025 2 Comments

Ontario in 2029

Back in 2022, just after the last provincial election, I wrote a piece looking forward a few years and predicted that the years 2023-25 were going to be chaos for Ontario postsecondary institutions. And I was right, although I can’t claim to have anticipated any of the specifics. Given that we are now going back into an election, I thought I would try to look into a crystal ball and look at what the province’s postsecondary system will look like

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February 3, 2025 No Comments

More Eating the Future

Morning everyone. Welcome back. Some statistical wonkery today, with respect to the analysis of government expenditures on postsecondary education. Many of you will recognize Figures 1 and 2 from earlier blogs or the State of Postsecondary Education 2024. They represent the two most-common ways to look at commitments to postsecondary education: the first in per-student terms, and the second in per-GDP terms. Figure 1: Provincial Expenditures per FTE Student by Sector, 2022-23 Figure 2: Provincial PSE Expenditures, by Sector, as

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January 6, 2025 No Comments

The Meaning of 2025

So, was that a fun year, or what? From Marc “Tonya” Miller and the federal government knee-capping the postsecondary sector in January to Marc “Harding” Miller and the federal government coming back around in September to knee-cap the college sector specifically to Ontario college presidents calling each other whores and more…it was a year to remember. Heck of a ride. But as catastrophic as the current fall in revenue seems, it’s worth remembering a couple of things. First, we’re not

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December 11, 2024 3 Comments

Fall and Rise

Fall and Rise The question I am getting more often than any other these days is: “what are you hearing about cuts at colleges and universities?” And my answer for the most part has been: “damned if I know.” The reason for my confusion is that publicly available details are few and far between. The HESA Towers team has been scouring the public record for details on institutional budget announcements; by our count, only 34 universities or colleges have so

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December 10, 2024 1 Comment

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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