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The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Funding and Finances

College Finance Data 2017-18

Morning.  Just after the blog closed for the holidays, Statistics Canada did its annual release of data from the FINCOL survey (that’s the one that asks colleges about their income and expenditure, just like FIUC does for universities, only in a lot less detail).  So, as usual, I thought I would give you a look into the data. Let’s start with the big picture.  Nationally, revenue at colleges increased by 2.8% after inflation, which is pretty good.  It’s not quite the 7%

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January 9, 2020 No Comments

Perma-SIF

As I noted back on Monday, one of the basic dynamics we see in Canadian public finance is the long-term deterioration of provincial finances and the long-term improvement of federal ones, mainly due to changing demographics and the cost of heath care. Take a look at the projections from the Parliamentary Budget Office from their 2018 Fiscal Sustainability Report, which shows this trend rather clearly: long-term provincial government debt numbers are off the charts, while the feds are on a continuous

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January 8, 2020 No Comments

Welcome to the 2020s

Hi all.  Hope you all had a restful set of holidays. At the start of a new decade, it is fashionable to look ahead at what will happen in one’s sector.  Personally, I think that life is going to change in ways we can’t imagine over the next ten years, so getting too specific is a fool’s errand.  What I would like to do instead is talk about what the big challenges are going to be. The first big challenge

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January 6, 2020 4 Comments

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (4)

If you’re joining late, we’re talking about the policy decisions that need to be made when creating a student aid system.  Read up on student loan origination, student loan repayment parameters and the loans/grants balance. So now we’ve got all the big pieces in place – where the money comes from, how much is going to be loan vs. grant, and how loans are going to be recuperated.  Now we get to the really fiddly bits: how to ration the aid (warning: this is a stupidly

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December 5, 2019 2 Comments

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (3)

Welcome back to this little series.  On Monday and Tuesday we looked at loans – how to pay for them and how to design repayment systems.  Today, I want to introduce grants into the mix (to be clear, I’m only talking about grants where need is the primary criterion – there’s a whole other set of policy considerations about merit-based aid, which I’m going to leave to one side during this discussion). Theoretically, the grants vs. loans debate is one of the most important

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December 4, 2019 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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