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Category: Canada

Quid Pro Quo

The last federal budget was, as I noted at the time, a freaking disaster for post-secondary education, and a vivid warning to Government Relations that the arguments that the system – well, universities anyway – had hitherto relied upon were simply not working anymore and that a re-think was required.  Judging by the twitter convos I keep an eye on, I think this lesson is starting to penetrate, in the sense that people are recognizing that simply pointing at Israel

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May 29, 2023 3 Comments

The Political Argument for Higher Education

Let me start with three comments/conversations I’ve seen and had in the past little while. Those are all interesting observations on their own but let’s think about the implications of the three comments together.  In other words, institutions have two choices.  First, they can wait for brief moments when the political system allows politicians to ignore the short-term interests of donors and hit them hard.  Or, second, they can exert themselves to try to make institutions like universities and colleges

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May 10, 2023 3 Comments

Three Unrelated Stories

Sometimes I need a mental break from writing a few hundred words on one topic.  So, today, here’s a few hundred words on three separate topics. 1) The Sexuality Gap.  A few years ago, Statistics Canada threw a question on sexual orientation into the Canadian Community Health Survey.   What this meant was that we suddenly got a lot of demographic data on the country’s LGBTQ+ population, including the finding – published in Ethnocultural diversity among lesbian, gay and bisexual cultures

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May 8, 2023 No Comments

Final Thoughts on Historical Higher Ed Finances

After three blog posts looking at historical data on financing (see here, here and here), I thought I should do one final one which tries to tease out some lessons.  Let’s focus on what I think are the key graphs from yesterday: Figure 1: Total Institutional Income per FTE Student by Source, Canadian Universities, 1962-63 to 2020-21, in constant $2022 Figure 2: Total Institutional Income per Full-Time Student by Source, Canadian Colleges, 1976-77 to 2020-21, in constant $2022 Figure 3:

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April 18, 2023 2 Comments

Historical Higher Education Data-Palooza Part 3

So it seems a lot of you were pretty interested in last week’s data fest and in particular this graph (of which I am inordinately proud, ‘cos damn it took some work). Figure 1: Total Government Transfers to Institutions by Source and Type, Canada, 1955-56 to 2020-21, in millions of $2022. The big story here is that institutional income in post-secondary education has grown much faster from 1999 onwards than it did at any time in the preceding 30 years. 

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April 17, 2023 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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