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Category: Funding and Finances

Private Capital in Higher Education (Part I)

When you think about it, higher education is one of the greatest businesses in the world.  It’s a guaranteed and growing market – as economies develop, people want more of it.  And people are willing to pay tons of money for it.  Worldwide, total spending on PSE (public and private) is somewhere in the range of $1.5 trillion annually, at least a third of which comes in the form of tuition fees.  There has to be profit in there – and who

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June 18, 2019 1 Comment

Does the Canada Student Loans Program Make Money?

Note: travel has limited writing time. In light of the NDP releasing their New Deal for People, it seemed a good time to re-run this post on the whether the federal government “profits” from the student loan program. Congrats and thanks to the NDP for releasing their platform early, but the claim that is “profiting from student debt” is highly suspect, especially since the 2019 budget reduced interest rates on the loans. You’ll remember a couple of weeks ago I

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June 17, 2019 No Comments

Trudeau vs. Harper

As we move inexorably towards a fall election (21 October, in case you’d forgotten), it is time to try to evaluate how well the present government has done on skills, science and higher education and how its record stacks up against its main competitor, the Conservative Party.  We obviously can’t do a manifesto analysis now because the Conservatives don’t have a manifesto yet (though frankly, this recent set of policy speeches by Andrew Scheer are less than encouraging).  However, while

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June 4, 2019 8 Comments

Balanced Budgets

A few weeks ago, the federal and länder governments in Germany reached a ten-year accord with respect to funding for scientific research.  Result: a decade of planned 3% annual increases.  Needless to say, this elicited quite a few envious glances from folks in Canada, who only get funding increases in jerky fashion, often after years of neglect.   Partly, this was a product of Germany’s more healthy system of science federalism, where different levels of government talk to each other like grown ups instead of

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May 28, 2019 No Comments

2019 Provincial Budget Roundup

Every year around this time, I do a simple piece summarizing all the provincial budgets.  I usually wait until all ten are done – so y’all get the full national picture – but unfortunately that’s not possible this year because neither PEI nor Alberta, both of whom quite recently acquired new administrations, are planning on getting budgets out the door before I break for the summer.   So, I figured I may as well get the whole thing – or 8

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May 15, 2019 2 Comments

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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