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Category: Funding and Finances

More Inter-Provincial Finance Comparisons

Yesterday we compared provinces on PSE spending as a percentage of GDP – that is, as a percentage of their ability to pay.  More or less, what we found was that most provinces were pretty similar, at 2.5% of GDP, with Saskatchewan a bit lower, Alberta a lot lower, and Nova Scotia and PEI much higher.  But provinces have different economic capabilities and different student participation rates.  So how do all these different expenditure patterns play out where it counts, in dollars

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April 2, 2015 4 Comments

Some Inter-Provincial Finance Comparisons

Last week, I blogged about how OECD figures showed Canada had the highest level of PSE spending in the world, at 2.8% of GDP.  Many of you wrote to me asking: i) if the picture was the same when we looked at other measures, like per-capita spending or spending per-student; and, ii) could I break things down by province, instead of nationally.  I am ever your servant, so I tried working on this. I quickly came up against a problem,

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April 1, 2015 1 Comment

Investing in Students

One thing I’ve seen a lot of recently, particularly from the left, are exhortations to “invest in education”, “invest in people”, and “invest in students”.   However, as economist Stephen Gordon noted on twitter this weekend, the actual meaning of the verb “to invest” is “to acquire a productive asset”.  So, in a literal sense, it would appear that a lot of people on the left are interested in a government-led return to slavery. Of course, this isn’t what the left

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March 30, 2015 7 Comments

Banning the Term “Underfunding”

Somehow I missed this when the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2014 came out, but apparently Canada’s post-secondary system is now officially the best funded in the entire world. I know, I know.  It’s a hard idea to accept when Presidents of every student union, faculty association, university, and college have been blaming “underfunding” for virtually every ill in post-secondary education since before Air Farce jokes started taking the bus to get to the punchline.  But the fact is, we’re tops.  Numero uno.  Take

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March 24, 2015 7 Comments

Stop Saying Higher Education is a Public Good

Few things drive me crazier than when people claim higher education is a public good, and then claim that, on that basis, it deserves either: a) more public funding, or b) needs to be funded exclusively on a public basis.  This argument represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what the term “public good” actually means. When most people hear the phrase “public good”, they’re probably thinking something like, “it’s good, it’s publicly funded; therefore, it’s a public good”.  But  that rationale is

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March 4, 2015 15 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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