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Category: Budgets

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

2013-14 Provincial Budget Analysis

The last of the provincial budgets was delivered last week, so it’s time for a quick analysis of spending on operating funding for universities and colleges. Some important caveats on this data: Budgets often have only a vague relationship with what actually gets spent.  Last year in Quebec, for instance, what eventually got allocated to institutions was a good $120 million less than what was budgeted.  So numbers for 2013-14 need to be viewed as provisional.  And to be consistent,

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May 9, 2013 1 Comment

Some Perspective on those Alberta PSE Cuts

So, everyone seems to be getting very upset about the Government of Alberta having cut budgets by 7%.  Of course, cuts are always very painful, but I think it’s worth stopping to consider the government’s perspective on this issue, which I think boils down to this specific graph: Figure 1: Provincial Government Expenditures per FTE Student, Selected Provinces               (Since I know some of you will ask: Data is StatsCan, drawn from the 2012-13

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May 7, 2013 9 Comments

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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