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Category: Funding and Finances

Watching the Americans

[the_ad id=”12142″] Yesterday I looked at the situation at Purdue University in Indiana and noted that one of the things permitting the “miracle” of frozen tuition was the significant increase in state appropriations over the last few years.  This made me wonder whether Indiana was an outlier or not, and indeed how states had been performing in the recession’s aftermath. About ten years ago, as the economic crisis was starting to take hold in the United States, things started to turn really

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April 25, 2018 No Comments

Risk (Income)

Over the course of the last three days we’ve been talking about all kinds of risks: today, I want to talk about financial risks and particularly how institutions generate income. Greater institutional income is a panacea for problems facing institutional boards: the more income you have, the better position one is in to deal with all those risks we’ve been talking about all week .  A rich institution can pay to attract good staff (both academics and key non-academic positions, like

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April 19, 2018 No Comments

Five Approaches to Subsidizing Students

Specialists sometimes like to talk as if post-secondary funding is some kind of arcane science.  But if you cut to the chase, it’s actually pretty simple.  You can tinker around the edges, and you can use different techniques to fund different parts of the system, but fundamentally there are only these five approaches: Subsidize nothing.  Some education is private and does not attract any subsidy.  In fact, in large swathes of Asia, Africa and Latin America (not to mention about

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April 12, 2018 1 Comment

Enough, Ontario

Our usual annual round-up of provincial budgets will come Wednesday, right after Saskatchewan posts its numbers, but as I was writing a draft of the piece I realized it makes almost no sense to talk about national trends in provincial funding without looking at what is going on in Ontario, because to a large extent it drives the national numbers.  And what is going on in Ontario – what has been going on in Ontario – over the past decade

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April 9, 2018 2 Comments

Debt-Free Policies

There’s a new policy fashion in student aid and it’s called “debt-free PSE” (or debt-free college, depending on which side of the border you reside).  But what does it mean? Some might think of debt-free PSE as being similar to tuition-free PSE, but in fact they are quite different in practice for two reasons.  The first difference is that under debt-free PSE, the level of tuition can be anything you please: the only thing that is constant is that all

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March 26, 2018 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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