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Category: Government

Curves and Formulas

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

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December 5, 2023 2 Comments

Follow up on Quebec

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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October 19, 2023 7 Comments

Accepting Failure and Trying Something New

If there is one thing that drives me to despair about Canadian universities these days, it is how poor many federal government relations (GR) strategies are.   I can boil the issues down to three specific aspects. Too many cooks.  30 years ago, I am fairly sure no university in Canada had a permanent independent GR presence in Ottawa (apart from the two schools located there).  Now there are a couple of dozen who do.  Much of what they are trying

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October 17, 2023 4 Comments

Manitoba Manifesto Analysis 2023

Ok folks, you know the drill.  An election means a manifesto analysis, and with the Manitoba election only 24 hours away, I’m overdue on this one. Manitoba is a 2-and-a-half party system.  Since 1969, the NDP and Progressive Conservatives have each had three periods in power (NDP for 30 years, Tories for 24), so these are the two platforms to watch. The Liberals have held seats in the legislature for all but 4 of those years, but only once managed

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October 2, 2023 No Comments

Demography, Incentives, and the Future of Canadian PSE

Let’s start with a little history. Figure 1 shows the evolution of the youth population (aged 18-21) in Canada from 1971 to 2022.   The remarkable thing here is that this demographic group peaked over 40 years ago.  What that means is that pretty much all the nearly tripled increase in domestic enrolments in the last four have come from increasing participation rates rather than population growth. Figure 1: Population Aged 18-21, by Region, Canada, 1971-2022 This growth has not been

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September 25, 2023 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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