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Category: Funding and Finances

Variation in Tuition in the United States

One of the things foreigners always get wrong about the American higher education system is tuition fees.  The external perception of tuition is driven by what’s happening at the famous private institutions, mainly in the country’s northeast.  But that’s not even close to being the whole story. Figure 1: Tuition by Type of Institution, United States, 2014-15               It is true that tuition at private non-profits is pretty high – $31,231, on average; though it

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November 21, 2014 1 Comment

An Update from Australia

Back in our spring (their fall), the Government of Australia announced a new university funding policy, which consisted of: Cutting per-student public funding by about 20%; but, Subsequently allowing funding to rise along with enrolments (this is known in Australia as “demand-driven funding”); Simultaneously de-regulating all tuition; and, Allowing the interest rate on student loans to rise from equal to inflation to equal to the government’s 10-year bond rate (i.e. actually placing a real interest rate on the loan). Understandably, students

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November 12, 2014 No Comments

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

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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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