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Category: Budgets

HESA’s 2014 Federal Budget Commentary

Hi all, The team at HESA towers was up late last night putting together – as we do every year – a review of the Federal Government’s Budget measures, as they relate to higher education and training.  Far from being the snooze-fest many had predicted, it turned out there was a whole bunch of crazy stuff in there, from vast but slightly hazy research funds, to largely inexplicable apprenticeship loan programs.  You can read all of our budget coverage, HERE. Still

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February 12, 2014 2 Comments

Cooling the “War on Science” Rhetoric

Today’s budget day.  I think we can be reasonably certain that no matter what comes up on the R&D front, somebody is going to trot out the meme that the Harper government is conducting a “War on Science”.  But this is, at best, a half-truth.  There is an enormous difference between the Harper government’s record of heeding scientific advice and its behaviour towards government scientists, on the one hand, and its record of funding academic science, on the other. Their

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February 11, 2014 1 Comment

The Salaries Problem

I’ve made a few key points over the last couple of days: 1)      Canadian Universities will be lucky if they keep being able to increase their incomes by 3% per year, holding enrolments constant. 2)      The kinds of salary settlements we have seen recently at Canadian universities, if allowed to continue, will eat up easily 70-80% of that income, maybe more, leaving precious little left over for IT, infrastructure, etc. 3)      It’s not a problem of administrative bloat.  The ratio of academic salaries

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January 9, 2014 8 Comments

How Universities Are Becoming More Labour-Intensive

Yesterday, I showed how universities in New Brunswick were – despite welcome new promises of stable funding from the provincial government – facing problems because salary increases were going to eat all the available new money.  Some of you possibly thought I was being alarmist.  But it’s easy enough to show how this can happen.  In Ontario, it already has. For data here, I pulled the financial statements for the last five years at the “Big 8” (Toronto, Waterloo, Western,

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January 7, 2014 5 Comments

Financing Canadian Universities: A Self-Inflicted Wound (Part 5)

We’ve covered a lot of ground in the last few days.  Back on Tuesday, we asked the question why faculty-student ratios could fall by 20% over two decades when per-student income had jumped by 40% over the same period.  The best way to sum up the answer is with the following graph: Changes in Total and Operating Income per Student, Academic Salary Mass, and Student-Teacher Ratios, Indexed to 1992               The top line is

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September 13, 2013 5 Comments

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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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