The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Funding and Finances

Probably not the next Laurentian, but…..

As I noted yesterday, there are only two institutions in Canada which have run deficits in each of the last five years: St. Thomas University (STU) and Vancouver Island University (VIU). In both instances, these institutions have had deficits averaging between 4 and 5% of their total income over the course of those five years. By any definition, this puts them on some kind of watch list. As Figures 1 and 2 show, the root cause of both institutions’ problems

Read More »
May 7, 2025 2 Comments

Post-COVID University Surpluses (Deficits)

Ok, everyone, buckle up. For I have been looking at university financial statements for 2023-24 and the previous few years, and I have Some Thoughts. In this exercise, I examined the financial statements from 2017-18 onwards for the 66 Canadian universities which are not federated with a larger institution and had income over $20 million. L’Université du Québec was excluded from the analysis below because it has yet to release financial statements for 2023-24. Figure 1 shows the average net

Read More »
May 6, 2025 1 Comment

To Poach or Not to Poach

Hi all. Welcome back to nine whole uninterrupted weeks of the blog. Let’s get to it. A couple of weeks ago, I mused about the possibility of individual universities using philanthropic dollars to start poaching some talented researchers wanting out from the United States. Now comes news that the University Health Network—the super-hospital network that in research functions as a massive force multiplier to the University of Toronto’s medical school—is trying to hire 100 top early career researchers from around the

Read More »
April 14, 2025 3 Comments

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition It’s been a little over five years since I took a serious dive into the question of “administrative bloat,” which apparently exists everywhere but in the statistics. Still, always good to check assumptions every once in a while, and I thought five years was long enough to make a new look at the data worthwhile. So here goes: Let’s start by reviewing what we can and cannot know about staffing at Canadian universities. StatsCan

Read More »
March 26, 2025 2 Comments

That NIH Thing You’re Hearing About

If you’re in the higher education field, you have probably heard a lot in the last four days about the Trump regime reducing funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—roughly the equivalent of our Canadian Institutes of Health Research, only with a budget four times larger even after adjusting for population size. Specifically, the Trump administration is limiting the amount of overhead costs that institutions can recover from government. Cue much shouting in the US about adverse impacts, destruction

Read More »
February 11, 2025 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...