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Category: Funding and Finances

Why Everyone Loves International Students (Part 1)

A nice simple post today: why universities are going bananas for international students. The first figure shows undergraduate tuition fees for international students in each province.  They range from a little under $10,000 in Newfoundland, to just over $25,000 in PEI.  The national average for this period is $18,840; in Ontario it is $23,000. International Undergraduate Tuition Fees by Province, 2012, in $2013               What’s more, fees for international students have been going up

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May 7, 2014 5 Comments

Nova Scotia Ditches a Bad Subsidy

About a decade ago, a really bad policy idea started making its way across the country’s “have-not” provinces.  I can’t remember if it started in Saskatchewan or New Brunswick, but within a couple of years it had spread to Manitoba and Nova Scotia, as well.  The details (and generosity) of this policy varied somewhat, but the gist of it was this: “let’s pay our graduates not to leave the province by refunding a portion of their tuition, via tax reductions,

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April 25, 2014 No Comments

The Cost of Expanding Access in Poor Countries

I’ve been dealing a lot with issues of access in Africa (specifically, Senegal and Uganda) over the past couple of months.  And I think I’m coming to the conclusion that there are some situations where it flat-out doesn’t make any sense to expand access. If you’re a producer of good and services, the main advantage of poor countries is that labour is cheap.  This is why manufacturing has, over the years, drifted to lower-wage countries – first Mexico, then China,

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March 25, 2014 No Comments

March Madness

It’s March Madness in the US – the annual NCAA basketball tournament.  And so it’s time to ask the question: what the hell is it with Americans and intercollegiate sport, anyway? To most of the rest of the world, the American college sports industry – by which we mostly mean Men’s Basketball and Football – is flat-out ridiculous.  There are 420,000 student athletes.  Attendance at college football games is 48 million/year.  Total income for college sports is just under $11 billion

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March 24, 2014 4 Comments

Capital!

If you’re ever bored and playing around with CAUBO data (what do you mean, “no else does that”?) you may have noticed that in 2011 there was a significant (roughly 3%) decrease in university expenditures – which is weird, because no province significantly reduced funding to universities that year, and universities never voluntarily reduce their spending.  So what the heck is going on? The quick answer is: the Knowledge Infrastructure Program (KIP) ended, and so institutions lost a nice little source of

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March 21, 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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