Category: Funding and Finances

A New Alberta Postsecondary Review

The week before last, the Alberta Minister of Advanced Education, Rajan Sawhney announced a funding review for Alberta post-secondary education. I saw a fair bit of snarky comment about this on social media which I thought was kind of unfair. (Note to followers: now that Bluesky actually has passed the minimum viable size to be a useful social media platform, you’ll mostly find me there rather than Twitter. My address is: @alexusherhesa.bsky.social). So, let’s break it down a bit. The

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Carnage

Y’all may recall January 22nd, when federal Immigration Marc Miller slapped a national cap on international student visas which implied a 35% cut (but larger in Ontario) and effectively killed off the PPP industry for (mainly Ontario) community colleges. You may also recall September 16th, when Miller returned to say “surprise! Now the cap includes graduate students” and also made changes to the post-graduate work-visa program which are likely to obliterate colleges’ ability to recruit students (the guesses I am hearing from the

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Some Notes on Global Funding of Higher Education

This blog post is adapted from a presentation I gave last week at the European Universities’ Association’s Funding Forum in Helsinki. My colleague on the panel, Enora Pruvot, was tasked with summarizing funding trends from the perspective of European institutions; mine was to zero in on the world’s 11 biggest spenders on tertiary education outside Europe, which is why you won’t see data in here on places like France, Germany, the UK, or Spain. (Why eleven? It was supposed to

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OECD Education at a Glance 2024, Part 2

Last week, I showed you some of the coolest data from the new edition of the OECD’s Education at a Glance. However, I didn’t do anything on finances because I was not sure about the Canadian numbers (I’m still deeply puzzled by the numbers in a couple of other countries), but thanks to some very helpful folks at StatsCan, I now understand what is going on and it’s just probably quite bad news for Canada. Let’s start with looking at

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The Eighth Wonder of the World: Ontario College Finances to 2023-24

Over the summer some of the HESA team went through the financial statements of the 24 Ontario Community Colleges for both 2022-2023 and 2023-24 statements. It’s…well, pretty wild. Ontario colleges were going after international students pretty heavily before COVID. But in the two years since the pandemic mostly subsided, the numbers are crazy. We don’t know exactly how crazy because the Government of Ontario, in an amazing show of either incompetence or gutlessness, is now five months late in releasing

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