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Category: Funding and Finances

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

Re-capturing the early 80s

Most of the time when I talk about the history of university financing, I show a chart that looks like this, showing that since 1980 government funding to the sector is up by a factor of about 2.3 after inflation over the last 40-odd years, while total funding is up by a factor of 3.6. Figure 1: Canadian University Income by source, 1979-80 to 2022-23, in billions of constant $2022 That’s just a straight up expression of how universities get

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January 15, 2025 No Comments

College Financials 2022-23

StatsCan dropped some college financial data over the XMAS holidays.  I know you guys are probably sick of this subject, but it’s still good to have some national data—even if it is eighteen months out of date and doesn’t really count the last frenzied months of the international student gold rush (aka “doing the Conestoga”).  But it does cover the year in which everyone now agrees student visa numbers “got out of control,” so there are some interesting things to

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January 13, 2025 No Comments

More Eating the Future

Morning everyone. Welcome back. Some statistical wonkery today, with respect to the analysis of government expenditures on postsecondary education. Many of you will recognize Figures 1 and 2 from earlier blogs or the State of Postsecondary Education 2024. They represent the two most-common ways to look at commitments to postsecondary education: the first in per-student terms, and the second in per-GDP terms. Figure 1: Provincial Expenditures per FTE Student by Sector, 2022-23 Figure 2: Provincial PSE Expenditures, by Sector, as

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January 6, 2025 No Comments

The Meaning of 2025

So, was that a fun year, or what? From Marc “Tonya” Miller and the federal government knee-capping the postsecondary sector in January to Marc “Harding” Miller and the federal government coming back around in September to knee-cap the college sector specifically to Ontario college presidents calling each other whores and more…it was a year to remember. Heck of a ride. But as catastrophic as the current fall in revenue seems, it’s worth remembering a couple of things. First, we’re not

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December 11, 2024 3 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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