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Category: Funding and Finances

Ten Bad Arguments about Free Tuition in Canada

So this weekend at the NDP convention, delegates voted in favour of a free tuition policy.  Based on a totally unscientific scan of twitter afterwards, here are the ten most common arguments in favour of this move, and why each of them is wrong. 1. The federal government can totally impose free tuition on the provinces No, it can’t.  The best it could do would be to pay the provinces to reduce tuition, which could be difficult given that they

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February 20, 2018 17 Comments

Science Federalism

A couple of months ago, I read a rather interesting book called National Innovation Systems and the Academic Enterprise, which is a collection of essays edited by David Dill and Frans van Vught.  It’s a collection of essays about national – and in the case of the US, subnational – innovation policies, and while the quality of the national essays is a bit uneven (the Canadian one was marked mainly by overuse of the word “neoliberalism” and excessive off-point moaning about

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February 14, 2018 2 Comments

Funding Polytechnics v. Funding Universities

Recently, a colleague asked me how big I thought the gap in funding was between polytechnics and universities.  My hunch was that universities were certainly better funded if you include all sources of income, but that if you just looked at core provincial government funding, the gap might not be so large.  So, for giggles, I decided to try to compare the two. Due to the complexity of various funding mechanisms and – especially – the difference in the nature

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February 7, 2018 1 Comment

College Revenues versus University Revenues

As you all know, I spend a lot of time analyzing university finances, mainly because the data is easy to get and is quite detailed (Canadian higher education statistics are disastrous in many ways, but one area where our stats are better than almost anywhere else in the world is our institutional financial reporting – the FIUC Survey is genuinely world-class).   But I normally don’t spend the same amount of time on community college, which is something I’d like to change starting

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January 18, 2018 1 Comment

The Cost of an Aging Professoriate

You may have read recently about how Canada is really sticking it to junior researchers.  Dalhousie’s Julia Wright recently wrote about Canada haemorrhaging early-career research capacity and she has a point – just in the last seven years, the proportion of Canadian faculty aged 40 or less has fallen by a third, from roughly 22% to just over 15%. The question, of course, is “why”?  Some – including Wright – just blame a “shrinking academic labour market”, which tends to (either by

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December 6, 2017 7 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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