Category: Funding and Finances

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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Aggravatingly Clueless

Much of the current discourse about international students sounds something like this: “We love international students, it’s just that we want them to get a more Canadian-oriented education. They shouldn’t be in global business programs, they should be in trades programs, they should be in health programs. You know, things that contribute to Canadian society. If only we enrolled international students in these programs, we could let in more and more of them”. This is, simply, a combination of wishful

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A China Update

If you’ve been reading this bog for a while, you’ll know that I occasionally keep tabs on what’s going on at some of China’s top universities. I haven’t done it in a couple of years or so, so I thought it was time for an update. Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the C9 League of universities—that is, the Chinese equivalent of Canada’s U15, only even more elite—minus the

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The College Program Apocalypse

A lot of people have been speculating about what’s going to happen in the Ontario College sector now that its use of the money-printing machine of ever-increasing international student numbers has been shut off. Some have speculated about Laurentian-style bankruptcies. I think that’s extraordinarily unlikely given the way this is playing out. I do think some significant changes—sometimes quite deleterious ones—are going to occur in Ontario post-secondary. It’s just that it’s going to happen at the level of individual programs,

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Europe/ Canada: Same/ Different

Good morning from the Brussels-to-Paris Eurostar, where I am hanging out with the good folks of the University Vice-Presidents’ Network on our study trip to Belgium and France. We’ve had some excellent meetings, including a really fascinating visit to KU Leuven (one seriously well-run university), and a chance to catch up with some old friends at the European Universities Association. And I just wanted to pass along some of the similarities and differences I am seeing between Europe and Canada right

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