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Category: Government

Supply-Side Liberalism and Post-Secondary Education

There is a new intellectual fashion in the United States called Supply-Side Liberalism.  Basically, the idea is that government’s main role is less about managing aggregate demand and more ensuring the cheapest possible supply of goods and services.  In the US, this approach is rapidly emerging as the new centrist consensus, mainly because the sudden return of inflation as a major economic phenomenon means that all the left bromides about the need to use government funding to stimulate aggregate demand

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November 24, 2022 1 Comment

University Finances 2021-22

Nearly all universities have posted their financial statements for 2021-22, so that means it’s time to look at how year two of COVID went for Canadian universities. Let’s define who is included in the sample.   Not all institutions have put out their 2021-22 financials including: Algoma University, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Concordia University, Université Laval, Polytechnique, and the Université du Québec system, so these cannot be included.  I have also left out Mount Royal University and

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November 22, 2022 1 Comment

Health Spending

Y’all are used to me playing around with financial data in the post-secondary sector.  Today, I want to play around a bit with data on cost escalation in the health sector, just so you all can see what the heck the post-secondary sector is up against when it comes to budget discussions in provincial cabinets. Let’s start with Figure 1, which shows provincial spending on health and post-secondary education since 2002.  Turns out that in the 2000s, post-secondary education was

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October 11, 2022 No Comments

Quebec Election Manifestos 2022

Quebec goes to the polls next Monday, and while I do election manifesto analysis for all provinces, the one for Quebec is a bit extra special, both because of the sheer number of parties and because Quebec’s one of the few places in the country where we have seen consistent increases in investment, even if the current government does have some funny ideas about things like “academic freedom”.  In reverse order of current polling results: Parti québécois.  Remember when they

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September 29, 2022 No Comments

Trends in University Income

I haven’t done a deep dive into university finances into a couple of years, so I thought I would take a couple of days to look through the latest data from the Financial Information of Universities and Colleges survey (confusingly-named, since it does not include community colleges).  Today I’ll do revenues, and tomorrow expenditures. Let’s start with the simple long-term change in revenues.  Far from being in an “austerity” situation, universities have been growing their total income at a rate

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September 27, 2022 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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