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Category: Funding and Finances

Support Arts Faculties: Embrace Academic Profit Centres

Whenever someone at a university argues for the need to concentrate on boosting net revenues, you can pretty much count on large numbers of academic staff getting together to decry the move. They’ll brandish various Newman-esque (the Cardinal, not the Seinfeld character) arguments about how money corrupts the academy, how it betrays scholarship, etc., etc. And more often than not, the people brandishing these arguments will be from the Arts faculties. Outside observers usually assume that the Arts professors are

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June 5, 2012 No Comments

The Shape of Things to Come

Sit down before you look at this graph, which shows new investment in higher education in 2011. The data comes from our annual survey of 40 countries around the world which make up over 90% of all enrolments and scientific production. Change in Public Expenditures on Higher Education, 2011 The basic story here is this: in the OECD, we’ve finally hit what I call “Peak Higher Education”; the point beyond which we can no longer expect any increase in public

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May 8, 2012 No Comments

Chasing a Buck

There are a lot of institutions facing a demographic challenge over the next few years. Outside the GTA and the B.C. lower mainland, the youth population is in decline, and that means institutions in these regions are either going to have to start increasing their yields or find some new markets to exploit. (Or, I suppose, cut their budgets a bit, but that seems to be a last resort.) Though I can’t claim to have a lot of granular detail

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May 3, 2012 No Comments

How to Fix the Canada Learning Bond

Chances are you’re familiar with Registered Education Savings Plans. Though they’ve been around for 40 years now, it was only with the 1998 budget’s introduction of the Canada Education Savings Grants and their 20% top-ups of RESP contributions that they got big. Nowadays, parents contribute $3.39 billion per year to RESPs, and the CESG program hands out $667.1 million per year. Of course, people pointed out at the time that the CESGs offered much more to families that could afford to

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April 12, 2012 No Comments

Improving the Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSSP)

While out in Saskatchewan recently, I heard an interesting rumour to the effect that INAC was investigating the possibility that substantial sums of PSSSP money – that is, money paid to individual First Nations for use by their members for post-secondary education – was either going unused or being used for purposes other than post-secondary education. Assuming this is true, one shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that fraud is at work (though obviously that’s possible). It’s not unheard of for

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March 14, 2012 1 Comment
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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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