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Category: Funding and Finances

Health Spending

Y’all are used to me playing around with financial data in the post-secondary sector.  Today, I want to play around a bit with data on cost escalation in the health sector, just so you all can see what the heck the post-secondary sector is up against when it comes to budget discussions in provincial cabinets. Let’s start with Figure 1, which shows provincial spending on health and post-secondary education since 2002.  Turns out that in the 2000s, post-secondary education was

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October 11, 2022 No Comments

Education at a Glance 2022

It’s that day of the year, when OECD releases its annual report on education across the world’s richest countries, known as Education at a Glance.  I have written about these releases many times before, and in truth a lot of the data tells the same story, year after year: Canada has very high attainment rates, mainly due to the way we choose to present our data on college students.  We also spend more than most countries on post-secondary education if

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October 5, 2022 No Comments

University Expenditures 2020-21

Morning all.  Yesterday, we looked at details of university expenditures over time: today we will look at how universities spend their money.  I am not going to show any of this in dollar terms, because as can be inferred from yesterday’s blog, all spending is way up over the past couple of decades (about 90% after inflation), and it is up across almost every category of expenditure.  Instead, what I am going to do is express expenditures on various line

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September 28, 2022 No Comments

Trends in University Income

I haven’t done a deep dive into university finances into a couple of years, so I thought I would take a couple of days to look through the latest data from the Financial Information of Universities and Colleges survey (confusingly-named, since it does not include community colleges).  Today I’ll do revenues, and tomorrow expenditures. Let’s start with the simple long-term change in revenues.  Far from being in an “austerity” situation, universities have been growing their total income at a rate

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September 27, 2022 2 Comments

Relative Effort

People often want to compare jurisdictional efforts with respect to postsecondary education investments.   These are typically exercises in choosing denominators: the numerator (total spending) is constant, it’s just a question of how to normalize raw expenditures.  In Canada, we tend to normalize expenditures in one of two ways: either in per student terms, or in terms of gross domestic product.  Figures 1 and 2 show these two measures across Canada.  In short, Newfoundland and Labrador and Saskatchewan look the best

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September 13, 2022 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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