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Category: Budgets

Is Queen’s Running Out of Money?

Earlier this month, the Queen’s student newspaper, The Queen’s Journal, reported on what seems to have been an extraordinary outburst by the university’s Provost, Matthew Evans, during a campus Town Hall to discuss cutbacks in early December. During this meeting, the Provost is alleged to have said “I’m concerned about the survival of this institution. Unless we sort this out, we will go under.” The story was picked up by a number of outlets across the country, including CTV and

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January 22, 2024 6 Comments

Does Ontario’s Auditor General Understand Universities?

Back in December, Ontario’s Auditor General released a “Value-for-Money” audit of York University.  It is…odd.  Almost disqualifyingly so.  If I were in charge of York’s comms, I would have ripped the AG a new one over nonsensical, utterly context-free “findings” and recommendations (obviously there are good reasons why no one puts me in charge of comms).   However, since I have no affiliation with York University at present, I am in a position to do the said ripping, because clearly someone

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January 9, 2024 5 Comments

The Other Side of the Coin

I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking about Ontario colleges, about how they have responded to persistent underfunding by via the international student business (either on their own or via public-private partnerships).  But I have not spent so much time discussing the province’s other sector, the one which faced similar losses in government-controlled revenue but did not did not pursue international quit so arduously.  So today, let’s talk about Ontario universities. We can start by looking at financial data

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September 13, 2023 No Comments

Sayonara, Ko’rishguncha, Қош болыңыз!

Morning all.  It’s summertime and it’s time to wrap things up.  Tomorrow, you will be getting our final podcast for the season – an interview with Yale Professor Zachary Bleemer on the upcoming US Supreme Course decision on university admissions (it’s a good one!).  But today is the last post of year 12 (time flies!) of the blog, and tradition demands I give a summing up and a look forward.  The summing up is pretty simple.  When people look back

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June 14, 2023 3 Comments

What Six Questions Tell Us About the Ontario Government

In the final scenes of the 1991 movie The Russia House, as Sean Connery is about to give “the shopping list” – a comprehensive list of questions about Soviet rocket technology – to what MI6 and the CIA believe is a potential Russian defector, there’s a conversation between a young agent and Edward Fox, who plays Sean Connery’s handler. “Sir, the shopping list.  It’s only questions isn’t it?  It wouldn’t tell anyone anything?” “Everything.  It would tell what we know

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May 24, 2023 2 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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