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Category: Funding and Finances

Presidential Compensation

Over the summer, the revelation that the University of Alberta paid Indira Samarasekera two full years of administrative leave at over $550,000 per year after the conclusion her ten-year (two-term) Presidency caused a series of snit-fits, the most notable one being this one from Paige MacPherson, the Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. As I’ve noted before (here and here), Canadian university Presidents are not that well paid, at least by the standards of other Anglosphere universities.  Paul Kniest, of Australia’s National Tertiary

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September 18, 2017 1 Comment

Notes on the Finances of China’s Top Universities

One of my distractions over the past summer has been to learn more about Chinese universities.  And, fortunately, this is becoming a lot easier as Chinese universities are starting to put more of their data online.  Today, I just want to take you through a bit of a tour of China’s top universities (roughly the equivalent of the US Ivy League), which are known as the “C9”, most of which now put their financial data online. So let’s start just

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September 14, 2017 No Comments

Some Curious Data From OECD Education at a Glance 2017

The OECD put out its annual Education at a Glance  publication yesterday.  No huge surprises except for the fact that they appear to have killed one of the most-used tables in the whole book (A.1.2, which compared tertiary attainment rates for 25-34 year olds by type of tertiary program – i.e. college v. university) which is an enormous bummer.  The finance data says what it pretty much always says: Canada is the #2 spender overall on higher education at 2.6% of GDP

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September 13, 2017 No Comments

The Growing Importance of Fee Income

I made a little remark last week to the effect that on present trends, student fees would pass provincial funding as a source of revenue for universities by 2020-2021 and combined fed-prov government funding by 2025.  Based on my twitter feed, that seems to have got people quite excited.  But I should have been a little clearer about what I was saying. First of all, by “on present trends”, I literally meant do the simple/stupid thing and take the annual change from

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September 11, 2017 1 Comment

Canadian University Finance Statistics (2015-16 Edition)

The 2015-16 version of Financial Information of Universities and Colleges Survey (which, confusingly, doesn’t include community colleges) was released over the summer.  As in previous years I’m going to do a little summary of what it tells us about how income and expenditure has change over one year and five years.  Just so we’re all clear, all figures here are in real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) dollars.  And – caveat – comparisons with 2010-11 are a little weird because Quebec universities changed their fiscal

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September 6, 2017 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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