Category: Funding and Finances

Eating the Future

As anyone who was alive at the time knows, if you want to pick a decade when Canada was at its nadir, it was the 1990s. We managed to have a currency crisis, a fiscal crisis, a national unity crisis, and a recession which basically lasted seven years. It was bleak, bleak, bleak. But in one very important way, it was better than today. Because at least, even though we were broke (both Saskatchewan and Newfoundland flirted with bankruptcy in

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The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, 2024

Morning all. It’s the Wednesday after Labour Day and that means, as usual, that it’s release day for The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, by Janet Balfour and yours truly (with a big assist from Jiwoo Jeon). You can download it in all its glory here. In many recent years, I have used this document to talk about international students and the increasing role they play in Canadian post-secondary finance, but I figure you guys have probably heard that

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Welcome Back. Let’s Go!

Hi everyone. I missed you guys! Welcome to Season 14 of Canada’s longest-running data-informed higher education rant. Time flies, doesn’t it? Last year’s experiment of replacing one blog a week with a podcast seems to have gone pretty well so we’ll be continuing that. Our Friday blogs on Artificial Intelligence will be shifting to bi-weekly so we can deliver more detailed analysis and coverage on that subject. On alternate Fridays, we will be providing you with a new feature, The

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No One is Coming to Save Us

Good morning, all. This is the final blog for the year apart from tomorrow’s podcast. I am probably going to do one or two blogs if and when big news comes up during the summer (and we at HESA will have some big event-related news fairly shortly, so stay tuned). As usual, all feedback and suggestions for the blog are welcome—just drop me a note at president at higher ed strategy dot com. Regular daily service will return on Tuesday

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Budgets, Trust, and POVs

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me. It’s end of term/conference season, and so I get a lot of requests to go around the country speaking to Boards, Senates, leadership groups, etc. And the most interesting parts of these discussions are the Q&As, particularly when the same theme crops up multiple times. And the bits that keep coming up are around budgeting. There’s an obvious reason why everyone is worried about budgeting. It’s because the sector is screwed.

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