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Category: Funding and Finances

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

Long-Term OECD Data on Institutional Financing

Just for fun, I went prowling through some back issues of OECD’s Education at a Glance (as one does), to look up how public financing of tertiary education has changed over time.  OECD specifically says you shouldn’t do this, which I see as an admission that they view the data submitted by national governments as either not particularly reliable or at least compiled by different people using different definitions/standards on an annual basis.   Having looked over the data, I can

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October 10, 2023 No Comments

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
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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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