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Category: Budgets

The Dawn of a New Era

The events of the last couple of weeks have kept everyone in the higher education sector in a whirlwind. But step back a minute. It’s worth thinking about the big picture. Some of you may remember this graph which I drew about a year ago, looking at the history of higher education funding in Canada. It shows total university and college income by source back to 1955-56. Looking at the trends across these six decades, I think it tells a

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February 5, 2024 6 Comments

Update on University Finances

Last week, I wrote about college finances. Today I thought I would spend some time updating some of the more interesting graphs I’ve done over the past few years with respect to university finances.  I do quite a lot on university finances in HESA’s annual State of Post-Secondary Education, but over the years I have also done some slightly more bespoke takes that don’t make it into SPEC. And so, herewith, my 2024 update on those numbers. In Figure 1,

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January 31, 2024 No Comments

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

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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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