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Category: Funding and Finances

Ending the Merit Scholarship Arms Race

Here’s a way the new Ontario Minister of Training Colleges and Universities, Reza Moridi, could do everyone an enormous service, and win political capital at the same time: force institutions to cut back radically on automatic merit-based entrance scholarships. Here’s the background: at some point in the 1990s, Canadian institutions hooked onto the idea of giving out entrance awards as a way of managing enrolment.  It was a nice trick to help lock students in early in the admissions process

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September 25, 2014 4 Comments

Who’s Relatively Underfunded?

As I said yesterday, there’s a quick way to check claims of relative underfunding in block-grant provinces: take each institution’s enrolment numbers by field of study from Statscan’s Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS), plug those numbers into the Ontario and Quebec funding formulas, and then compare each institutions’ hypothetical share of total provincial weighted student units (WSUs) under those formulas to what we know they actually receive via CAUBO’s annual Financial Information of Universities and Colleges (FIUC) Survey. Simple, right?

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September 4, 2014 4 Comments

“Relative” Underfunding

Institutions always claim to be underfunded.  Seriously, I’ve been at universities in maybe 25 countries – including Saudi Arabia and the Emirates – and I have yet to find an institution that thought it was overfunded.  The reason for this is simple: there’s always just a little bit more quality around the bend, if only you could buy it (the university down the street has a space-shuttle simulator? We need an actual space shuttle to stay competitive!).  So it’s easy to

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September 3, 2014 1 Comment

Predicting the Effects of Australian Fee De-regulation

If the Australian government’s plan on fee-deregulation comes to pass, what follows will be one of the greatest experiments ever in higher education.  Institutions will have the right to set fees exactly as they want, which begs two questions: what will they do with that power, and what will the effects be? Let’s start with the first question.  When institutions in England were given the freedom to set tuition fees up to a maximum of £9,000, nearly all of them immediately

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August 29, 2014 2 Comments

The Australian Experiment (Part 1)

I spent a good part of this month in Australia, talking to people about the radical program introduced in the May budget.  The basics of the system are as follows: A recently-introduced plan of uncapped places, with the government funding as many students as institutions wish to admit, was maintained; however, the average amount of the per-student subsidy will drop by 20%; Tuition fees will be fully de-regulated.  Institutions will be able to charge what they like, subject to the

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August 28, 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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