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Category: Funding and Finances

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

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
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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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