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Category: Funding and Finances

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

Some Consequences of Declining Public Funding

Home truth: while total funding for higher education has increased rather substantially over the past couple of decades, an increasing proportion of this funding has come from private sources.  If anything, that trend is going to continue for the next decade, at least.  Unfortunately, our decision-making structures and mentalities are stuck in the era when institutions could count on governments to bail them out. I noticed this initially during the St. FX strike.  One of the main lines of discourse

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February 20, 2013 2 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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