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Category: Funding and Finances

Canadian PSE Funding Is Weirder Than You Think

I’ve been playing around with funding data and discovered something a bit mind-altering.  It has to do with Ontario and how different it is from the rest of the country when it comes to post-secondary funding.  (All of the following graphs show income of PSE institutions – that’s colleges and universities together – from public and private sources expressed as a percentage of GDP.  Data for other countries come from OECD Education at a Glance 2018; data for Canadian provinces

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September 3, 2019 4 Comments

Private Capital in Higher Education (Part II)

To really understand universities, you need to understand their cost structure.  And to understand their cost structure, you need to understand that unlike businesses, they keep score not by profits but by prestige, and that prestige – to the extent it does not derive from events and successes in the long-ago past – is, to a considerable extent, driven by total expenditures.  Thus, to “succeed” institutions must spend as much as possible.  This leads to what is known as the

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June 19, 2019 No Comments

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

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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