Category: Funding and Finances

The Finances of World Class Universities (Part 2)

Yesterday we looked at the absolute incomes of world-class universities; that is institutions in the top 200 of the 2017 Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities (ARWU). Today, I want to look at the question of whether things are getting better or worse for these institutions. Of the 174 top-200 ARWU universities for which we have financial data for 2015 or 2016, 155 have data on finances and students going back to 2006. For another 11 institutions, we have data going back

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The Finances of World Class Universities (Part 1)

Along with my colleague Marcos Ramos, I’ve been working recently on some analysis of “world-class universities” and how they have been getting on in the world.  Over the next couple of days I’m going to just lay out some of this research.  Buckle in: We define “world-class universities” as any institution in the top 200 of the 2017 Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities (ARWU).   Our measure of financial clout is expenditures per student, converted to $US at purchasing-power-parity, using

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The Real Competition is Closer Than You Think

I’ve recently been dismissive of the notion that Canada is “falling behind” in higher education since everyone seems to insist on making ludicrous comparisons with places like China, Switzerland and Singapore.  But upon a little bit of further digging, it turns out there is one of our very close competitors which is doing rather well these days, one we probably should be worried about despite the fact that we’ve mostly been ignoring it since the Financial Crisis of ’08. It’s our

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China, Switzerland, Singapore

The other day, I questioned a claim made by University of Toronto President Meric Gerlter that we were falling behind countries like “China, Switzerland and Singapore” having made major recent investments in science and higher education.  First of all, I noted, this was an odd trio, with nothing much to suggest it was true other than the rise of a few institutions in such countries as doing reasonably well in various university rankings.  Second, I noted that the claim that

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Some Surprising (?) Data on Canadian University Expenditures

I’ve been doing some work on financial data of higher education institutions around the world, and specifically looking at what’s been going on at top research institutions compared to everyone else.  And I thought maybe you all would be interested in what I’ve found for Canada. For the purpose of this document, I have separated the six institutions in Canada which always come top in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka “Shanghai Rankings”) – that’s Toronto, UBC, McGill, McMaster,

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