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Category: Funding and Finances

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

How Performance-Based Funding in Ontario Incentivizes Arts Enrolments

I have noted over the years that there is a strain of thought in the humanities which absolutely revels in its own demise.  I call it “humanities disaster porn”, in which pretty much any tale of atrocities being committed on the humanities must be true because we can conceive of it being true.  Remember the rumour about Japan closing down all humanities faculties that even big outlets like the Times Higher fell for?  That turned out, on a close read,

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May 13, 2019 2 Comments

The Warren Proposal

No doubt everyone has heard about the ginormous ($1.25 trillion) promise that Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren made around post-secondary education last week.  But I suspect more people heard/saw the heat and noise about the promise rather than the promise itself.  So, herewith, a quick rundown and analysis: So, the first thing to note is that technically the package contained several policies.  The two major ones are about making tuition free in public schools, and a massive

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April 30, 2019 1 Comment

Performance-Based Funding 101: The Algorithm

The biggest missing piece in the Ontario government’s proposed performance-funding system is any discussion of the algorithm by which data on various indicators gets turned into an actual allocation to institutions.  The lack of such a piece is what leads most observers to conclude that the government has no idea what it’s doing at the moment; however I am a glass-half-full kind of guy and take this as an opportunity to  start a discussion that might impact the government’s thinking

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April 25, 2019 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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