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Category: Funding and Finances

Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 1 : The Building Spree

Morning all.  It’s been just over a year since the Laurentian University President and Board of Governors made the decision to declare insolvency.  Largely because of the institution’s decision to maintain radio silence with its own community and with journalists it doesn’t feel it can handle, there are major aspects to this story where we still do not have a complete picture of what happened, either in the long term (how did Laurentian get into this pickle) or the short-term

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January 17, 2022 11 Comments

Victory

Morning everyone.  Ready for another term of being trampled by a goddamn virus?  Me neither.  Still.  Onwards. Towards the middle of December, the Prime Minster’s Office released mandate letters for all cabinet ministers.  Yes, a mere three months after voting day, a meager 18 weeks after Parliament was dissolved for an incredibly urgent election, “the most consequential election of our lives”, the Prime Minster finally figured out what it was that he wanted his cabinet to do.   Better late than

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January 10, 2022 1 Comment

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

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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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