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Category: Funding and Finances

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

The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, 2022

Good morning.  Today marks the launch of the fifth edition of The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada (SPEC).  You can download it here.  It’s a bit different from previous editions: it includes a new section on research in Canada, as well as a new Appendix containing a set of information-sheets for each province (patterned on the “nutshell” series which y’all seemed to have enjoyed).  And I am sure it also includes a whole new batch of mistakes, too, which

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September 6, 2022 No Comments

The “Higher Education” Premiers of the 21st Century.

Quick, fun exercise: who are the top “Higher Education Premiers” of the 21st Century?  Let’s define this as simply the Premiers who made the largest investments in the sector (my criteria here is biggest increase over any four-year period – otherwise premiers with long tenures tend to get penalized).  Go ahead, write down your top four right now before I walk you through the data.  Anyone who guesses number 1 gets a gold star because I sure as hell didn’t guess

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June 6, 2022 1 Comment

British Columbia in A Nutshell

Morning everyone.  You know the drill by now, since we’ve already done this for Nova Scotia and Alberta.   So, let’s get going. Let’s start with student numbers.  British Columbia is very much like Alberta in the sense that it used to be a province where college students outnumbered university students until several institutions switched from being colleges to universities and everything switched.  In BC, we see this in 2008-09, which is when Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver

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May 12, 2022 No Comments

Provincial Budgets 2022

All ten provinces have now issued their budgets, so it’s time for our annual look at how governments across the country are choosing to invest (or not) in higher education.   Just a quick reminder about how I do this.  What I measure is budget commitments – that is, what governments say they are going to spend year over year.  This is not quite the same thing as what they actually spend – there are always small differences between what governments

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May 11, 2022 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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