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Category: Funding and Finances

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition

Check-in on Administrative Bloat, 2025 Edition It’s been a little over five years since I took a serious dive into the question of “administrative bloat,” which apparently exists everywhere but in the statistics. Still, always good to check assumptions every once in a while, and I thought five years was long enough to make a new look at the data worthwhile. So here goes: Let’s start by reviewing what we can and cannot know about staffing at Canadian universities. StatsCan

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March 26, 2025 2 Comments

That NIH Thing You’re Hearing About

If you’re in the higher education field, you have probably heard a lot in the last four days about the Trump regime reducing funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—roughly the equivalent of our Canadian Institutes of Health Research, only with a budget four times larger even after adjusting for population size. Specifically, the Trump administration is limiting the amount of overhead costs that institutions can recover from government. Cue much shouting in the US about adverse impacts, destruction

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February 11, 2025 No Comments

What People Get Wrong about the New CCAA Law

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Justin Trudeau’s record. A couple of people wrote in to chide me that I had not included the passage last year of Bill 59, a piece of omnibus legislation which among other things prevents postsecondary education institutions from using the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). I know a lot of professors—and perhaps more importantly, faculty unions and their provincial/national associations—think that this was a “Good Thing” because “Look What Happened at Laurentian.” To

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February 5, 2025 2 Comments

Student Aid in Canada: The Long View

Note: this is a short version of a paper which has just appeared in issue 72:4 the Canadian Tax Journal. How short? I’m trying for under 1000 words. Let’s see how I do. Canadian student aid programs existed in scattered forms since just after World War I but became a “national program” when the Dominion-Canadian Student Aid Program (DCSAP) was created in 1939. Under this program, the Government of Canada provided block cash grants to provinces who administered their own

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February 4, 2025 No Comments

Ontario in 2029

Back in 2022, just after the last provincial election, I wrote a piece looking forward a few years and predicted that the years 2023-25 were going to be chaos for Ontario postsecondary institutions. And I was right, although I can’t claim to have anticipated any of the specifics. Given that we are now going back into an election, I thought I would try to look into a crystal ball and look at what the province’s postsecondary system will look like

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February 3, 2025 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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