The events of the last couple of weeks have kept everyone in the higher education sector in a whirlwind. But step back a minute. It’s worth thinking about the big picture. Some of you may remember this graph which I drew about a year ago, looking at the history of higher education funding in Canada. It shows total university and college income by source back to 1955-56. Looking at the trends across these six decades, I think it tells a
Last Friday, the Ontario government issued a media release outlining what it was going to do with respect to international students in the wake of the Government of Canada’s Monday announcement on study permits and work visas. I reproduce it substantially intact below because it is so objectively terrible. To protect the integrity of postsecondary education and promote employment in critical sectors like health care and the skilled trades, the government’s measures will include the following: Colleges and Universities Career
Welcome back, everyone. Let’s jump in. You will recall that last fall the Legault government, reeling from a by-election loss to a suddenly resurgent Parti Québécois, decided to parade its nationalist bona fides by giving an unprovoked kicking to some major anglophone institutions: to wit, McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s. This kicking – which was imposed on all universities but clearly had a disproportionate impact on the three anglo schools – consisted of two separate policies. Imposing a minimum $17,000/year tuition
Time for a quick economics lesson. Every class in a post-secondary institution has a cost curve. It looks something like this: Once an instructor is assigned to a class, that class has a set cost to the university regardless of how many students enroll, shown above as the Cost Curve (CC). It’s mainly a function of the instructor’s salary and materials costs, which are very low in lecture courses, higher in laboratory courses, and highest in clinical courses. That CC
If you just gauge public sentiment by twitter, it would seem the that CAQ’s policies on international and out-of-province students announced last Friday have a lot of support. Certainly, someone was quick to put together a few infographics – highly inaccurate ones, to be sure – for use as memes. But usually the arguments were phrased in terms of whatabbouteries: how expensive programs in Ontario were (usually based on cherry-picking the costs at, say, U of T Law and pretending
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