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Category: Funding and Finances

A Dreadful Argument About Tuition Fees

I see that the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has just released a new paper by Hugh MacKenzie called The Impact of Taxation on the Higher Education Debates. It’s worth a read because it sets out the argument against higher fees in the most respectable terms possible – certainly more respectable that anything student groups themselves have come up with. It is still, however, a pretty crap argument. The spiel runs like this: the lazy talking point about how higher

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June 17, 2013 1 Comment

Projections From Queen’s Park

Professionally, I am a killjoy.  Most of my job involves explaining why education funding is not going to go back to the good times of the eighties any time soon.  How bad things are going to get differs from place to place, and today I want to show you why I think there’s big trouble still ahead in Ontario. Let’s start with the fact that government expenditures have risen sharply in recent years, as shown in figure 1.  The Liberals

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June 12, 2013 No Comments

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

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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