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Category: Government

Update from India (1)

I spent the last couple of weeks in India and the Middle East.  Over the next couple of days, I thought I would lay out some of my observations about higher education in these countries. First up, India, which has maybe the world’s most complicated higher education system (which I detailed in a three-parter back in 2014, here, here, and here – this blog will probably make more sense if you read them first).  Stripped to its essentials, India has the world’s second largest

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November 12, 2018 No Comments

The Balance of Federal-Provincial Expenditures

Today, I am going to try to pull all this data together to see to what extent federal and provincial shares of expenditure in PSE have changed over time. As far as institutional expenditures go, the presence of federal indirect transfers complicates a good historical look at the question.  Up until 1976, it’s possible to look directly at cash and tax transfers specifically designated for PSE, and it is possible again after 2007-08 when the Harper Government carved out a

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November 9, 2018 No Comments

Federal Expenditures on Students

Over the last couple of days, we’ve looked at federal transfers to institutions.  Today I want to look at federal transfers to students, which are Kind Of a Big Deal. It seems kind of hard to imagine today, but just over twenty years ago, the feds couldn’t wait to get out of the field.  In 1994, Liberal Human Resources Minister (and later U of Winnipeg President) Lloyd Axworthy tried to get a “win” on student aid by – and I

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November 8, 2018 No Comments

Federal Transfers to Institutions

The government of Canada has essentially four mechanisms for transferring money to post-secondary institutions. The first, as discussed yesterday, is the indirect means of transfers to provinces.  The second is through the research granting councils: the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); as of 2018, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), which disburses money for scientific infrastructure, is now considered the fourth granting

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November 7, 2018 No Comments

“Innovative” Funding Mechanisms

Adapted from a talk delivered yesterday at the 14th FICCI Higher Education Summit in New Delhi, India. If you spend any time talking higher education policy in developing countries, the talk turns pretty quickly to the subject of “innovative methods of financing”. It’s easy to see why: money is always short, quality higher education costs a lot, and so these systems are always terribly squeezed.  Anyone holding out hope for “innovations” always gets a ready audience. The problem is that actual innovations

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October 31, 2018 No Comments
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