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Category: Funding and Finances

More Provincial Expenditure Comparisons

I got a lot of feedback on last week’s blog about provincial PSE spending comparisons.  So much so that a few of you asked for a bunch of other comparisons.  This blog does nothing but aim to please, so let’s get to it. One question I received a couple of times was “what happens if you throw student assistance expenditures into the mix”?  This is a good question.  In particular, Ontario – which as you will recall came dead last in

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October 30, 2018 No Comments

History of PSE in Canada Part VII – The here and now (since 2003).

The current era of PSE in Canada essentially took shape at the end of the Chretien Era.  There has been a little bit of evolution in institutional forms (this is the era in which “polytechnics” arrive and applied research becomes a thing at the college level, and several colleges were converted into universities) but really no change in system architecture. There are certainly budget changes – rapidly increasing in the period to about 2009, and then levelling off with international student

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October 25, 2018 1 Comment

Comparing Provincial Expenditures on Post-Secondary Education

Answering the question of which provincial government spends the most on post-secondary education is trickier than it looks.  Not only do provinces differ in size (Ontario is roughly 95 times the size of Prince Edward Island), but they differ in terms of post-secondary participation rates, they differ in terms of the types of institutions they fund, and of course they differ in wealth and fiscal capacity.  So how can one sensibly compare these things? (For those of you with sharp

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October 24, 2018 2 Comments

That Fiscal Sustainability Report

A few weeks ago, the Parliamentary Budget Office put out a report (available here) on the sustainability of public finances.  It’s an excellent little report, with some key implications for post-secondary institutions across the country.  Today, I will discuss  two points in particular. The first key point has to do with the long-term sustainability of the finances of each level of government.  Though this is poorly understood, the two levels of government have i) different sources of revenue and ii) different

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October 23, 2018 No Comments

History of Canadian PSE Part V (to 1993)

The economic and fiscal history of Canada from the early 70s to the mid-90s is one long, bad disaster movie (the Cassandra Crossing, say).  Unemployment went over 6% in 1974 and didn’t come back down to that level until 2008.  For nearly all of the 1980s, it was over 8% and from 1982 to 1994 it was over 10% half the time.  The Keynesian medicine that was supposed to get us out of such messes simply did not work because

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October 11, 2018 1 Comment

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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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