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Category: Funding and Finances

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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September 24, 2020 2 Comments

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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September 9, 2020 No Comments

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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May 21, 2020 3 Comments

Better Together

So far in the pandemic, the fiscal picture in Canada looks like this: The federal government is splashing enormous amounts of cash through EI, CERB, CESB etc. to support individuals, and sustaining businesses through wage subsidies, rent subsidies, and cheap loans. Provincial governments have focussed mostly on meeting the front-line costs of the crises – such as costs in hospitals, long-term care centres – and on some boutique financial measures to help households (some extra money to seniors, breaks on

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May 4, 2020 No Comments

Coronavirus (16) – Shared Sacrifice

Lots of people are gaming out what post-Corona looks like economically.  Increasingly, we seem to have consensus that 2020 will be the worst year for the global economy since the early 1930s, with GDP drops for the year landing somewhere between 5-10%.  There is considerable debate about the speed of the bounce-back, with people talking about recoveries that V-shaped (i.e. quick), U-shaped (not so quick), or bathtub-shaped. We could be in this a long time: no one really knows the

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April 15, 2020 No 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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