Category: Funding and Finances

History of Canadian PSE Part IV (to 1974)

Morning all.  Since people seem to like these history pieces so much, I’ve decided to get us mostly caught up to the present day in one go.  Hope you enjoy! The period roughly from 1959 to the oil crisis of 1973-74 is rightly thought of as a Golden Age for higher education in Canada, much as it is in the United States.  Universities ballooned in size and gradually became more research-intensive.  A new class of institutions, community colleges, were added

Read More »

The Return of Peter Nicholson

Peter Nicholson occupies a very odd place in Canadian policy circles.  There are not many people as smart as him who are as little known outside Ottawa as they are influential within the capital.  So, when he speaks it is always worth listening because you know the senior folks in Ottawa are doing so. Last week, Nicholson wrote a stem-winder of a piece for IRPP. You should read it in full, but let me give you the Coles notes version: Canada

Read More »

Ontario Government Announces Huge Increase in International Student Numbers

[the_ad id=”11745″] Last week, freshman Ontario Finance Minister Vic Fedeli appeared before the Economic Club in Toronto and, reading from the best-selling book “Oh My God Who Knew the Previous Government Left the Finances in Such Terrible Shape: A Guide to Your First Provincial Budget”, announced that the actual, real, pinkie swear, true budget deficit for this year was $15 billion rather than $6 billion and that to help close the gap, Ontario colleges and universities would be asked to increase

Read More »

Comparing College and University Funding

[the_ad id=”11745″] While I was putting together The State of Post-Secondary Education, 2018 I did a simple comparison looking at provincial government funding for universities and colleges, using data from FIUC and FINCOL (the Statscan surveys of the finances of universities and colleges, respectively)  Here’s what I found: Figure 1: Provincial Government Funding per Full-time Equivalent Student, 2015-16 I had a hard time believing this relatively small gap was actually true: everybody knows universities get more money from governments than colleges, right? But I

Read More »

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

Read More »