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Category: Funding and Finances

Are Teaching Costs Increasing at Canadian Universities?

On Wednesday, someone took me to task in the comments section of the blog for part of my analysis on the financial situation of higher education, saying: “The HE sector has hiked tuition up far faster than inflation citing “Increased teaching costs”. They have been unable or unwilling to provide proper costings for this.” Is this true? Well, it depends how long a time-frame you choose to use. Let’s look at the data. To look at “teaching costs”, we need to use

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April 15, 2016 1 Comment

A New Deal

Yesterday, I noted that  for the last few years provincial governments have refused to either increase funding to PSE institutions to keep up with inflation, or give institutions latitude to raise tuition to make up the difference. Effectively, provincial governments seem a lot more concerned with ensuring that post-secondary education is cheap than with ensuring that it continues to receive real increases in income. There are competing opinions about why this is the case. My view is simply that few provincial

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April 14, 2016 2 Comments

Going Overboard on Basic Research?

I’m getting some worrying vibes from the new federal government.  It’s nothing I can directly put my finger on (other than some annoying Ministerial tweets last week which seemed to claim that any money put into PSE infrastructure is ipso facto about “innovation”) but I get the sense that the new government is in danger of making some real mistakes with respect to innovation policy.  Specifically, I’m worried that in the rush to repudiate the Harper legacy in all things

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April 12, 2016 No Comments

Those New Infrastructure Funds

I have been meaning to write about the new $2 billion “Strategic Investment Fund” (SIF), the 3-year infrastructure money-dump the Liberals announced in the budget.  However I waited a bit too long and Paul Wells beat me to it in an excellent little article called How to Spend $2 Billion on Research Really Quickly (available here). Do read Wells’ piece in its entirety, but the Coles Notes version is: The deadline for submission is quite soon (May 9), which is kind of a

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April 11, 2016 No Comments

Manitoba Election Manifesto Analysis

So, with Saskatchewan’s election out of the way (results unknown at time of writing but I assume it was a Sask Party blowout), it’s time to focus now on the election in next-door Manitoba.  This is somewhat difficult because neither the governing NDP nor the opposition Progressive Conservatives have chosen to do anything so mundane as issue platforms, preferring instead to simply issues a bunch of “priorities” or “announcements”.  The reason for this is straightforward: the Tories are up 20

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April 5, 2016 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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