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Category: Funding and Finances

China Update 2026

Hi all. Every couple of years I spend some time going through data on Chinese higher education and, in particular, the finances of the country’s top universities. It’s been two years since the last time I did this, so here goes: Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the elite C9 League of universities minus the Harbin Institute of Technology, which does not make previous years’ financial data available), in

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May 25, 2026 No Comments

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 2)

Yesterday, I began outlining how the Nova Scotia government is trying to measure university program costs, and got as far as working out how the scheme was capturing certain facts about program income (excluding government grants and fees of students yet to declare a program) and certain facts about expenditures (excluding infrastructure, student services, IT, and roughly 60% of tenured professors’ salaries and benefits) and considered various ways that some assumptions about how to distribute both costs and revenues were

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May 20, 2026 No Comments

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 1)

You may have heard of the program costing exercise (as part of an Academic Program Review) that the government of Nova Scotia has foisted on the institutions in that province. Today, I am going to go through how the exercise is being conducted as well as a few ways in which I find it lacking. Before I start, two nota benes (notas bene?). First, no one has paid HESA to do this analysis. This is a labour of…well, not love,

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May 19, 2026 1 Comment

Canadian Research vs. German Research

Hi all. I’m in Germany this week along with the members of our University Vice-Presidents Network having a blast networking with German institutions and hearing from some of the sharpest commentators on the German higher education scene, including Frank Ziegele, author of one of my favourite books of 2025, Authentic Universities (podcast interview here) and Jan-Martin Wiarda, my sort-of German equivalent in the sense of being a prominent education blogger, (albeit much more journalistically-inclined than I am). It’s been a

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May 6, 2026 2 Comments

2026 Provincial Budgets

Last Wednesday, Newfoundland and Labrador became the tenth province to deliver its budget, and that means it’s time for my annual review of provincial budgets. Spoiler: while it’s the usual mixed bag across most provinces, Ontario is the epicentre of this year’s stories. And not in a bad way. Let’s start with overall budgeted provincial transfers to institutions, shown below in Figure 1. Growth this year after inflation is a stunning 6.5% – a rise not seen in 20 years.

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May 5, 2026 No 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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