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Category: Funding and Finances

Financing Canadian Universities: A Curious Story (Part 1)

if you pay attention to discussions of higher education funding, one of the memes that inevitably pops up revolves around the notion that higher education has been under some brutal, neo-liberal assault since… well, I’m not sure, but probably since 1995 at least, and everything is being defunded, laid on the backs of students, it’s the end of civilization, dark ages ahead, etc., etc. Problem is, this yarn is utterly at odds with the data, which tells a very different

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September 9, 2013 2 Comments

Fired Up. Ready to Go.

Welcome back to our daily edition of One Thought to Start Your Day.  I hope you all had a relaxing summer, because this year is shaping up to be one of the most interesting in the entire history of higher education.  It’s going to be exhausting. As always, America – the home of mass higher education – will be setting the pace.  President Obama’s higher education reform proposals are so ambitious and touch so many hot-issues (metrics for institutional evaluation, how

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August 26, 2013 No Comments

Cuts at the University of Alberta

If anybody wants to know what Ontario universities are going to look like over the next couple of years, they could do worse than check out what’s going on in Edmonton. To recap: In its spring budget, the Government of Alberta cut 7% from university operating grants.  Since then, Alberta universities have been working out how to deal with this cut.  At Athabasca, it’s meant significant layoffs.  At Mount Royal it’s meant program closures.  At the University of Alberta, so

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August 19, 2013 11 Comments

Looking Forward to 2017-18

Last week we looked at likely paths for government funding in the big four provinces.  Today, I want to look at how that might translate into actual changes at institutions. The outlook for government funding, if you’ll recall, looks like this: Figure 1 – Nominal Non-Health Dollars Available by Province, indexed to 2013. But governments only account for about 54% of total revenue.  Students make up 39% and “other” makes up about 8%, so to look forward, one needs to look

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July 29, 2013 6 Comments

Go West

The key to understanding what post-secondary education is going to look like a few years down the road – say, 2017 – is to look at what is likely to happen to government funding.   We can’t know exactly what governments will spend on PSE, but we can know  how much money they are going to have available to spend simply by working out how much money each will likely have once health expenditures (which make up just 40% of the budget in

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July 23, 2013 1 Comment

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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