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Category: Budgets

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

Faculty Bargaining: A Modest Proposal

Faculty bargaining is going to get nasty over the next few years. Provinces appear to be in a mood neither for increasing grants to institutions nor for allowing domestic tuition to rise. Since that’s 85-90% of most institutions’ budgets, that makes overall revenue increases very difficult. The solution from the 90s – that is, packing in more domestic students – is tougher this time out because of demographics. International students are the only significant potential source of new revenue, but

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November 23, 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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