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Category: Budgets

A Dream Budget

Today is budget day in Ottawa.  Tonight, you’ll get our full budget coverage (replacing tomorrow’s morning blog), and if you’re of the twitter persuasion, you can follow my analysis from 4PM, on, at @AlexUsherHESA.  But for now, let’s think about what a good Canadian federal budget would look like for higher education. In keeping with the times, this will be a completely cost-neutral budget.  We’ll start with some obvious places to cut: the elimination of the education amount and textbook

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March 21, 2013 1 Comment

Skills Shortages (Part 1)

OK, apparently this week I’m going to have to talk about skills shortages, because it seems that people in Ottawa have LOST THEIR EVER-LOVING MINDS on the subject. The basics of the policy discussion are as follows: Canada currently has an unemployment rate of about 7.5%, which is deemed too high.  Despite there being roughly 6 unemployed people for every job vacancy, there are some jobs which are going unfilled because of skills shortages.  This, everyone can probably agree, is

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March 19, 2013 11 Comments

The New Normal: Students First, Institutions Last

There’s a new dynamic at work in Canadian higher education.  And it should scare the bejesus out of everyone who cares about the sector. Consider the following: In Alberta, where the Conservative Government last week cut operating budgets by nearly 7%, and institutions have been told to forget about offsetting through tuition fees, the student aid budget rose by almost a quarter. In Ontario, the Liberal Government won re-election last year on a platform of no more money to institutions

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March 14, 2013 2 Comments

The Effects of Freezing Administrative Salaries

I see that the University of Regina council has voted to freeze both administrative salaries and the growth of administrative positions, a recurrence of an ongoing meme which blames those hated administrators for the rising cost of education.  Because Regina’s administrative practices are relatively typical of Canadian universities, I thought I would test-drive this idea: how much have administrative salaries increased, and how much wiggle room would such a freeze provide? (Full disclosure: In 2010 and 2011, HESA was contracted

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March 11, 2013 4 Comments

The Beagles Have Landed

How do you run a business when profit is meaningless? This is a key question confronting every university administration. Our PSE institutes are businesses – complex organizations which require enormous amounts of money, from diverse sources, in order to succeed. For many reasons, it is a blessing that they are not oriented towards profit. But without a clear bottom line, how do you actually know when to spend, and when not to spend? What replaces the discipline of the market,

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December 17, 2012 1 Comment
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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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