Category: Canada

Comparing College and University Funding

[the_ad id=”11745″] While I was putting together The State of Post-Secondary Education, 2018 I did a simple comparison looking at provincial government funding for universities and colleges, using data from FIUC and FINCOL (the Statscan surveys of the finances of universities and colleges, respectively)  Here’s what I found: Figure 1: Provincial Government Funding per Full-time Equivalent Student, 2015-16 I had a hard time believing this relatively small gap was actually true: everybody knows universities get more money from governments than colleges, right? But I

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Work-Integrated Learning: We Can Do Better

You may have seen that late last week, the Business Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) rounded up a number of big names from colleges, universities and businesses to sign a letter to Finance Bill Morneau calling for the development of a National Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Strategy as part of the 2019 Budget.  What should we make of this? On the one hand, it is certainly a sign that lots of people are taking WIL seriously.  And that’s a good thing.  Canada is

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Canadian University Finances 2016-17 (Expenditures)

[the_ad id=”11745″] Good morning.  Yesterday, I took a look at some recent trends in income at Canadian universities; today I want to take a look at what is happening on the expenditures side. Let’s start by looking at something really important, which is the difference between total expenditures and operational expenditures.  In a normal year, operating budgets are 60-66% of total budgets.  A little more than half of the non-operating funds go to research, and the rest is split between

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Back to School 2018

Morning all.  Welcome back.  Everyone emotionally prepared for the semester?  No, me neither. So, it’s been an eventful summer.  The Saudi spat was most unfortunate: several thousand lives disrupted and a short-term hit of about $140 million to Canadian universities and colleges (they’ll make it all up on next year’s intake).  There’s some buzz around Ottawa on next year’s (pre-election) budget, particularly with respect to Indigenous education, something I’ll be talking about over the next couple of weeks.  And, of course, the Future Skills Centre (formerly

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Savings Plans

[the_ad id=”12755″] One of the unique aspects of Canada’s higher education funding system is its regime of Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs) and various kinds of public subsidies to these plans – the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG), the Alternative Canada Education Savings Grants (A-CESG) and the Canada Learning Bond.  What are all these things, and do they work as intended? Let’s start with RESPs, which are simply accounts in which interest and capital gains are allowed to accumulate tax-free. 

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