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Category: Canada

The Affordability of Canadian Universities, 2020, Part 2

Ok, so I got a little bit too excited in yesterday’s blog, when I indicated I could show how the increase in student aid spending since 2006 has improved affordability.  I forgot that while I do have aggregate data on grant expenditures across the country, data on how this money is split by institutional type is pretty scarce.  The Canada and Quebec student aid programs do publish data like this, but for some reason neither government chooses to leave older

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November 9, 2022 No Comments

Canada’s New and Wasteful Student Loan Interest Policy

In the Fall Economic Statement last Thursday, Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the government will eliminate student loan interest not just on loans going forward, but also retroactively. This was not out of the blue – the government promised this in the last election.  It remains, however, a disastrous idea.  Hundreds of millions of dollars a year for no real net benefit (at least in the field of education).  I have already laid out why this is a

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November 7, 2022 No Comments

Demography is Not Destiny, But….

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, first, Canada is facing something of a demographic trough with respect to young people, and second, that this the reason domestic enrolment at the post-secondary level is slumping.  Except, no.  The first was true 10-15 years ago, and while the second might still be true, it’s about to change in a hurry.  I wrote about reversing demographic trends a couple of years ago, but everyone could use an update because change in this

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October 31, 2022 2 Comments

Counting Students

Today’s blog is a nerdy one, prompted by a question from a client: “how many post-secondary students are there in Canada”?  If thinking about how Canadian governments measure the size of the student body isn’t your thing, feel free to skip today.  Let’s start by thinking about who reports student numbers.  Institutions all have a good idea of how many students they have at any given moment, basically because they need to know who has paid  (this sounds cynical, but

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October 25, 2022 No Comments

Health Spending

Y’all are used to me playing around with financial data in the post-secondary sector.  Today, I want to play around a bit with data on cost escalation in the health sector, just so you all can see what the heck the post-secondary sector is up against when it comes to budget discussions in provincial cabinets. Let’s start with Figure 1, which shows provincial spending on health and post-secondary education since 2002.  Turns out that in the 2000s, post-secondary education was

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October 11, 2022 No Comments
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