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Category: Funding and Finances

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

How to Improve Quebec Student Aid

As I noted last week  , the Government of Quebec is about to receive an unanticipated windfall in the form of an $80-$100M/yr “alternative payment” from the Government of Canada when the new Canada Student Grant system comes into effect. What should it do with the money? An easy reaction from the Finance people would probably be “stick it into general revenues”. The student aid system has got a lot more expensive in Quebec over the last few years. Between

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April 4, 2016 No Comments

Why the US Free Tuition Debate is Different

Free tuition is a growing political issue in the United States.  Most of the free tuition plans out there (for instance in Tennessee and Oregon) are effectively variations of what was recently introduced in Ontario – that is, a re-packaging of student aid so that some students pay “net zero” in college – or at least community colleges.  The plan President Obama has presented to Congress over the past twelve months or so seems to be a bit more expansive –

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March 30, 2016 No Comments

The Cultural Aspect of “Affordability”

In tuition policy circles, there are a lot of “grass is greener” perspectives: that is, people arguing about affordability based on foreign examples of either high or low tuition.  But one of the problems with looking at “affordability” of higher education in cross-national contexts is that affordability is a matter of perspective.  What’s affordable in one country often isn’t in another.  I don’t mean this simply in the trivial sense that some countries are richer than others.  Obviously a $3,000

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March 18, 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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