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Category: Funding and Finances

Ignoring Naylor

Cast your mind back to 2017 – 2018, when, in theory, everybody agreed that Canada’s Fundamental Science Review – aka the Naylor Review – was a Good Thing That Must Be Implemented.  And so we got the 2018 Budget, which dispensed billions of dollars, mostly back-ended, over six years and which was touted as the Greatest Research Budget Ever (via some competitive counting of the sort I described last week) even though in total it amounted to about a 14% real increase over

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December 6, 2021 1 Comment

Funny Math in Alberta

Many of my Canadian readers will likely have read a piece that has been circulating on the internet from Kim Siever, a self-described leftist internet journalist from Lethbridge.  The headline says it all: UCP Government to Cut Post-Secondary Spending by $1.5 Billion; That Number Rises to $3.5 Billion if you Factor in Inflation and Population Growth.  You know how I am always on about Economic Impact Analyses always being forms of competitive counting? Methodologically speaking, this is worse. Ok, so here’s

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December 1, 2021 No Comments

Affordability, 2021

StatsCan released its annual survey of tuition fees at universities last month (it does not bother to collect similar data with colleges, because reasons).  Average domestic undergraduate fees looked like this: Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition, by Province, 2021-22 Only two things to note here.  First, Ontario fees keep falling relative to other provinces because of the Ford government’s freeze on tuition (for which, hilariously, it continues to receive no political credit). For most of the past decade, Ontario was

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November 1, 2021 1 Comment

Core Funding Versus The Hustle

If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll know I often produce diagrams of funding trends for Canadian universities that look like this: Figure 1: Total University Revenue by Source in Billions of $2019, Canada, 1979-80 to 2019-20 But I am starting to think this method of portraying the data does not actually explain what is going on in universities these days.  Instead, I think there are really only two categories of funding that matter: those that involve getting paid for traditional

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October 26, 2021 3 Comments

Higher Education Crucible: The Former Eastern Bloc

Today, I want to talk a little bit about a region of the world that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention/respect in higher education talk, but which has recently faced some quite unimaginable financial and demographic challenges.   The higher education systems of the former Soviet Union and its erstwhile Eastern European allies have been through a wild ride over the past fifteen years and there really has never been another period in higher education history with such a rapid

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October 14, 2021 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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