Category: Funding and Finances

Canadian University Income, 2018-19

This year’s regular data release from the Financial Information of Universities and Colleges was delayed by about three months this year due to the pandemic, but it was released late last week. (This data does not actually include community colleges – that’s a separate survey that doesn’t get published for another few months, so sorry in advance for the university-centric material) As usual, I have a two-parter today and tomorrow to discuss the results, one on income and one on expenditure. 

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Student Loans and Income Tax Systems

Last week, I blogged about my disappointment with the Throne Speech.  However, I left out one really promising thing; namely, the idea that it would make possible free, automatic tax filing for simple returns to ensure citizens receive the benefits they need.  This is good, but in some ways insufficiently ambitions.  They should go further and fully modernize the system to make possible the collection of loans through the income tax system and thus make possible a more fully income-contingent loan

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Fall 2020 International Round-Up: Netherlands

Here’s a headline you don’t see every day: “Dutch aim to Stop Academics Working at Weekends”.  I hope Times Higher Education won’t mind me filching the opening paragraph, which is something: Academics should not be forced to squeeze their research into weekends and holidays, according to the Dutch education minister, who admitted that pressure on some researchers had become intolerable and that professional competition had gone “too far”. Well, now.  What to make of this? Let’s start with a refresher on Dutch higher

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OECD Education at a Glance 2020

The OECD released its Education at a Glance (you can download yesterday’s release here), and every year at this time I do a report on the release (see previous articles from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019).  Mostly my précises focus on the same couple of things, to wit: Canada has among the highest rates of higher education participation in the world, mainly because our college/polytechnic system is bigger and richer than that of any other country. Whether you measure expenditures on a per-student basis or on a %

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Jobs

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago how the financial position of US universities during the pandemic was going to be absolutely shattered.  In the public sector, that’s because states can’t deficit finance and so a declining tax base translates directly into lower public revenues for institutions; in the private sector it’s because there’s a real question about whether any students are going to pay $40K+ for an online semester.  The Chronicle of Higher Education is keeping track of the layoffs at US

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