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Category: Funding and Finances

Demography, Incentives, and the Future of Canadian PSE

Let’s start with a little history. Figure 1 shows the evolution of the youth population (aged 18-21) in Canada from 1971 to 2022.   The remarkable thing here is that this demographic group peaked over 40 years ago.  What that means is that pretty much all the nearly tripled increase in domestic enrolments in the last four have come from increasing participation rates rather than population growth. Figure 1: Population Aged 18-21, by Region, Canada, 1971-2022 This growth has not been

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September 25, 2023 3 Comments

Performance-Based Funding in Europe

If you’re in North America, you know that one of the perennial debates in higher education finance is about the efficacy of performance-based funding, or PBF, with the bulk of the academic evidence suggesting in one way or another that such schemes do not achieve their purported aims. On this week’s episode of The World of Higher Education Podcast, Dr. Ben Jongbloed from the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies – that’s CHEPS – at the University of Twente in

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May 26, 2023 1 Comment

What Six Questions Tell Us About the Ontario Government

In the final scenes of the 1991 movie The Russia House, as Sean Connery is about to give “the shopping list” – a comprehensive list of questions about Soviet rocket technology – to what MI6 and the CIA believe is a potential Russian defector, there’s a conversation between a young agent and Edward Fox, who plays Sean Connery’s handler. “Sir, the shopping list.  It’s only questions isn’t it?  It wouldn’t tell anyone anything?” “Everything.  It would tell what we know

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May 24, 2023 2 Comments

The Bill is Coming Due

Though there are ups and downs and local variations, over the past decade, three factors characterize the finances of the Canadian higher education sector. That’s it, that’s the whole story.    It’s a classic triangle: if one side increases in length and another one does not move, the entirety of the accommodation lies on the third side of the triangle. Now, to be fair, at the system-level this dynamic seems to work.  On average, the system is chugging along reasonably, with

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May 9, 2023 2 Comments

Provincial Budgets 2023-24

Morning, all.  It’s time for our annual provincial budget round-up.  University Affairs has done its round-up of budget announcements; I’m here to put the whole set of financial commitments under the lens and give it some long-term context. A couple of caveats before I start. First, PEI is not included, for the simple reason that the government chose not to submit a budget before going to the polls a couple of weeks ago.  But, in the big fiscal picture of

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April 19, 2023 2 Comments

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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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