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Category: Funding and Finances

Enforced Savings for Education?

It’s generally acknowledged that students from low-income backgrounds have trouble paying for education; that’s why across North America, they tend to get packages of loans and grants which are far in excess of the value of tuition.  And that’s a good thing.  But when it comes to people who are truly middle-class – that is, students near or just over the median family income, there’s a fair bit of debate – sometimes acrimonious – about how to assist them.  

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April 15, 2015 2 Comments

Students Won’t Save Us This Time

 I do a fair bit of barnstorming around Canada giving talks on higher education finance.  My audiences, by and large, split into two groups: those that remember the cuts of the late 90s and those that don’t.  The ones who don’t remember them are mostly OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD about future funding challenges (especially when I show them that – contrary to their belief – that operating income has actually been going up sharply recently).  The ones who do remember are more perplexed:

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April 14, 2015 No Comments

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

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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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