Category: Funding and Finances

Canada’s Well-funded and Highly Equitable PSE System

Yesterday was Education at a Glance release day.  That’s usually the time when I take a look at the latest data from across the OECD  and point out that in fact we in Canada have it pretty good.  Or, at least that was the piece I expected to be writing yesterday morning.  Until I found out that Canadian data was missing from more than just the usual number of tables.  Statscan was more annoying than usual this year, which means

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Canadian University Finances 2016-17 (Expenditures)

[the_ad id=”11745″] Good morning.  Yesterday, I took a look at some recent trends in income at Canadian universities; today I want to take a look at what is happening on the expenditures side. Let’s start by looking at something really important, which is the difference between total expenditures and operational expenditures.  In a normal year, operating budgets are 60-66% of total budgets.  A little more than half of the non-operating funds go to research, and the rest is split between

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Canadian University Finances 2016-17 (Income)

So, the 2016-2017 Financial Information of Universities and Colleges came out in July, and as usual I’ve got some highlights for you. This year, we’ll be doing this as a two-parter, one on income (today) and one on expenditure (tomorrow). For those of you looking for data on community college expenditures, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a few months – Statscan typically doesn’t release that data until December (but rest assured I will cover it when the time comes).

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The State of Canadian Post-Secondary Education, 2018

Good morning.  Today sees the publication of The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, 2018, our first annual review of Canadian post-secondary education institutions, students, faculty, and finances.  You can download the whole thing here, you can wait for me to dribble the whole thing out in blog-sized chunks over the next couple of months only with added sarcasm, or both! But today what I want to underline is what is effectively the lead story from the report, which has

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Savings Plans

[the_ad id=”12755″] One of the unique aspects of Canada’s higher education funding system is its regime of Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs) and various kinds of public subsidies to these plans – the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG), the Alternative Canada Education Savings Grants (A-CESG) and the Canada Learning Bond.  What are all these things, and do they work as intended? Let’s start with RESPs, which are simply accounts in which interest and capital gains are allowed to accumulate tax-free. 

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