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Category: Funding and Finances

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

Governance and Budgeting

Last week, I wrote a piece about how most Canadian universities seem to have come through the pandemic financially unscathed or even a little bit better off.  Briefly, universities pulled back on the spending in expectation of a collapse in revenues and then the collapse never really happened.  Result: higher surpluses. Let’s just say the reactions to this piece were…heartfelt.   And they often involved some combination of the adjective “lying”, and the nouns “tightwad”, “bastard” and “admins”.  To the extent

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October 12, 2021 No Comments

What Really Happened During COVID? Part 2

Yesterday, we examined student income during COVID.  On aggregate, income might not have dropped at all once the Canada Education Student Benefit is taken into the equation, though there was probably some re-distribution of money away from students who work summers to those who don’t.  Today, I want to look at what happened to institutions in the pandemic, because again the picture painted by the data emerging from institutional financial statements is quite different from the conventional wisdom about what

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October 6, 2021 2 Comments

Global Higher Education’s Post-COVID Future (2) – Funding Challenges Forever

Yesterday, I described some of the big changes of the past 18 months; today I will talk a little bit about the first of the three big trends that we need to watch for over the next few years.  This one I call “Funding Challenges Forever”. Around the world, COVID has had two distinct financial impacts on institutions.  In countries where the vast majority of funding came from governments (mainly, but not exclusively, Europe), the COVID shut-down had very little

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September 28, 2021 1 Comment

Global Higher Education’s Post-COVID Future (1)

Back in July, I was kindly invited to a conference sponsored by the Perspektywy Foundation in Warsaw to give a talk about the future of global higher education after COVID.  Over this week, I want to recap that talk and provide some analysis about the main policy trends affecting higher education of the next few years.  Not all these trends will affect countries equally (for reasons that will become apparent) but I think they probably capture the biggest pieces of

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September 27, 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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