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Category: Funding and Finances

Responsibility-Centred Budgeting

As I’m on the subject of finances and budgeting these days, I thought it a good time to bring up the topic of “responsibility-centred budgeting” (RCB).  It’s a timely topic, given both this ludicrous article in the Edmonton Journal last week, and the fact that I have one loyal reader who’s been urging me to write about it for months now (Hi, Alan!). Responsibility-centred budgeting basically says that units (usually faculties, occasionally departments) are responsible for raising their own funds and covering

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October 28, 2014 22 Comments

The Way Forward on Collective Bargaining

So, last week (here, here, and here) I noted that in most parts of the country, total compensation levels have been running more or less in line with changes to total operating grants.  But this is not a reason to become complacent about university finances and future collective bargaining agreements, for two reasons. First, what I’ve been showing is that salary mass has been increasing in line with operating income.  But salary mass and salaries are two different things.  If I give

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October 27, 2014 3 Comments

Scenario Planning for Ontario and Quebec

Yesterday, we looked at data from 2004 to 2012 to examine income and expenditure trends for Canadian universities, and found that salary and operating budgets were both moving up at a pace of around 4.4% per year in real dollars.  Today, I want to do a bit of scenario planning for the country’s two largest provinces using the same technique of focussing just on operating grants, tuition, and salaries.  Ontario Ontario sits in between two divergent trends – real public

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October 22, 2014 2 Comments

Operating Budgets

So, yesterday I said it was pretty easy to show what’s going on in university budgets just by looking at operating grants, tuition, and salaries – and so I thought, perhaps, I should practice what I preach.  So here goes: Between 2004-5 and 2012-13, operating grants from provincial governments rose from $8.27 billion to $10.9 billion (all figures inflation-adjusted, expressed in 2012 dollars), an average increase of 3.5% per year.  But this encompasses two very distinct periods.  Up until 2009-10, the rate

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October 21, 2014 3 Comments

Talking About Money

As I go from campus to campus across the country, one of the things that truly astonishes me is the poor quality of conversation about money. There are far too many campuses where the administration insists everything is fine, until it comes time to negotiate collective agreements (especially with faculty) – at which point everything is suddenly disastrous.  As a result, faculties are naturally suspicious of these claims.  If everything really is disastrous, they reason, why are we only hearing about this

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October 20, 2014 1 Comment

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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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