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Category: Funding and Finances

The Economics of Merit Scholarships

There is a wonderful moment in Philip Delves Broughton’s Ahead of the Curve in which he describes a fight between a student and an administrator at Harvard Business School.  During the altercation, the student asks why he is being jerked-around, since, after all, he is “the customer”.  To this, the administrator calmly replies: “no you’re not, you’re the product”. For serious institutions, this is exactly right.  People judge a school based on its alumni and their accomplishments.  Students are just inputs in

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May 30, 2013 No Comments

2013-14 Provincial Budget Analysis

The last of the provincial budgets was delivered last week, so it’s time for a quick analysis of spending on operating funding for universities and colleges. Some important caveats on this data: Budgets often have only a vague relationship with what actually gets spent.  Last year in Quebec, for instance, what eventually got allocated to institutions was a good $120 million less than what was budgeted.  So numbers for 2013-14 need to be viewed as provisional.  And to be consistent,

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May 9, 2013 1 Comment

Some Perspective on those Alberta PSE Cuts

So, everyone seems to be getting very upset about the Government of Alberta having cut budgets by 7%.  Of course, cuts are always very painful, but I think it’s worth stopping to consider the government’s perspective on this issue, which I think boils down to this specific graph: Figure 1: Provincial Government Expenditures per FTE Student, Selected Provinces               (Since I know some of you will ask: Data is StatsCan, drawn from the 2012-13

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May 7, 2013 9 Comments

The Limits to Internationalization

There’s a very important question that institutions across the land will soon need to confront, namely: how many international students can a public institution accept before taxpayers and governments say “no more”? It’s not an idle question.  In Switzerland, serious concerns are being raised about foreign student numbers that are getting close to the 40% mark.  In the US, where big flagship public universities have been adding international students in droves over the past few years, most feel reluctant to

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May 2, 2013 No Comments

Cross-Subsidies and Professional Programs

Canadian Lawyer magazine has an interesting little story about tuition rises at the University of Toronto.  Apparently, tuition there has been rising at 8% per year for some time now, and students, understandably, are upset. That’s a pretty run-of-the-mill story.  More interesting, however, was Dean Benjamin Alarie’s defense of the hikes.  To wit: “The cost of satisfying our obligations increases steadily over time, and without corresponding provincial [government] increases to our funding, we need to find a source to finance

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March 6, 2013 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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