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Category: Budgets

More Money Than You Think

If there’s one thing everyone knows, it’s that Canadian universities have had a hard time of it during the recession during the last few years, yes?  Absolutely starved for income because of government cutbacks, etc etc. Not so fast.  Check out this data on university operating budgets from the CAUBO/StatsCan financial survey: Figure 1: Indexed growth in University Operating Budgets 2007-08 to 2011-12 That’s right – across the country, university budgets went up by 28% between 2007-08 and 2011-12.  That’s

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July 15, 2013 3 Comments

What if Higher Education Subsidies Were Transparent?

 An interesting little exercise in budget analysis: There are just under 5600 humanities professors at Canadian universities, and 7600 in the social sciences (excluding law, which is another 600 or so).  On average, these people make about $108,000/year (slightly higher in social sciences, slightly lower in humanities).  Add another 25% on that for payroll taxes, health, and pension, and the direct costs of employing these folks is about $135,000 per year.  That comes out to about $1.85 billion in total.

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June 13, 2013 14 Comments

Projections From Queen’s Park

Professionally, I am a killjoy.  Most of my job involves explaining why education funding is not going to go back to the good times of the eighties any time soon.  How bad things are going to get differs from place to place, and today I want to show you why I think there’s big trouble still ahead in Ontario. Let’s start with the fact that government expenditures have risen sharply in recent years, as shown in figure 1.  The Liberals

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June 12, 2013 No Comments

Progression Through the Ranks (PTR)

So, here’s the little budget secret that everyone in higher education tries to hide: it’s called Progression Through the Ranks (PTR).  That’s the name given to the automatic raise professors and librarians get every year, simply based on seniority.  And over the next few years, as we head into genuine zero-budget-increase territory, it’s going to significantly erode institutional purchasing capacity. Come collective bargaining time, unions and administrations seem to go at it hammer-and-tongs.  “We demand a 2.5% annual pay increase!”  “No,

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May 29, 2013 1 Comment

Feed the Students, Starve the Schools?

Yesterday, I outlined the 2013-14 budget picture for university and college operating transfer funds.  Today, I’m doing something similar for student assistance. It’s a very different picture. In addition to the caveats I mentioned yesterday regarding the challenges of budget-to-budget comparisons, student aid analysis poses its own unique set of challenges.  The main one is that provinces have trouble accurately predicting demand; so if in one year demand soars (or falls), the next year tends to bring a big budget

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May 10, 2013 2 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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