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Category: Funding and Finances

Is Queen’s Running Out of Money?

Earlier this month, the Queen’s student newspaper, The Queen’s Journal, reported on what seems to have been an extraordinary outburst by the university’s Provost, Matthew Evans, during a campus Town Hall to discuss cutbacks in early December. During this meeting, the Provost is alleged to have said “I’m concerned about the survival of this institution. Unless we sort this out, we will go under.” The story was picked up by a number of outlets across the country, including CTV and

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January 22, 2024 6 Comments

College Finances 2021-22

Statscan released new data on community college enrolments and finances last month. That’s an excellent opportunity for me to update some of my favourite charts. Let’s start with what’s been happening in terms of income over the past couple of years. Turns out college revenue has been relatively stable at $14 billion over the past few years. The only exception was the COVID year of 2020-21 where income fell to $13.1 billion partly because of reduced tuition income (fewer international

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January 16, 2024 No Comments

Curves and Formulas

Time for a quick economics lesson. Every class in a post-secondary institution has a cost curve.  It looks something like this: Once an instructor is assigned to a class, that class has a set cost to the university regardless of how many students enroll, shown above as the Cost Curve (CC).  It’s mainly a function of the instructor’s salary and materials costs, which are very low in lecture courses, higher in laboratory courses, and highest in clinical courses.  That CC

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December 5, 2023 2 Comments

Two Ways of Looking at Academic Hiring

One of the endlessly recurring debates in Canadian higher education concerns whether institutions are properly investing in faculty.  It’s never entirely clear what “properly” means – the goalposts move a bit depending on who is talking.  Sometimes it’s about faculty hiring lagging behind student enrolment, sometimes it’s faculty not getting their “share” of money coming into universities.  The comparator varies, but the ratio is always claimed to be moving in the wrong direction.  This blog seeks to examine this claim

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November 21, 2023 2 Comments

What’s in Ontario’s Blue Ribbon Panel Report?

The province decided to release the report of its Blue Ribbon Panel on Post-Secondary Education Financial Sustainability last Wednesday.  Remember, this was a report commissioned by the provincial government in response to a pair of reports from the Auditor-General, one on Laurentian University and another on other smaller institutions in November 2022.  It’s not what I would call an ambitious document; the panel’s terms of reference instructed that any recommendations “be considered through the lens of fiscally responsible and affordable

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November 20, 2023 1 Comment

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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