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Category: Government

Where Responsibility for Financial Sustainability Lies

I often write about the unsustainability of university finances, the lunacy of its cost base, the fact that Canadian profs are better paid than in any public system of higher education in the world, etc.  Some people have concluded from this that I am hostile to labour, or to academic unions in particular. But that’s not true.  Though I do call BS on some of the sanctimonious nonsense that comes out of academic unions on the beleaguered state of their

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October 8, 2013 19 Comments

Cuts at the University of Alberta

If anybody wants to know what Ontario universities are going to look like over the next couple of years, they could do worse than check out what’s going on in Edmonton. To recap: In its spring budget, the Government of Alberta cut 7% from university operating grants.  Since then, Alberta universities have been working out how to deal with this cut.  At Athabasca, it’s meant significant layoffs.  At Mount Royal it’s meant program closures.  At the University of Alberta, so

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August 19, 2013 11 Comments

Looking Forward to 2017-18

Last week we looked at likely paths for government funding in the big four provinces.  Today, I want to look at how that might translate into actual changes at institutions. The outlook for government funding, if you’ll recall, looks like this: Figure 1 – Nominal Non-Health Dollars Available by Province, indexed to 2013. But governments only account for about 54% of total revenue.  Students make up 39% and “other” makes up about 8%, so to look forward, one needs to look

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July 29, 2013 6 Comments

Go West

The key to understanding what post-secondary education is going to look like a few years down the road – say, 2017 – is to look at what is likely to happen to government funding.   We can’t know exactly what governments will spend on PSE, but we can know  how much money they are going to have available to spend simply by working out how much money each will likely have once health expenditures (which make up just 40% of the budget in

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July 23, 2013 1 Comment

A Tool To Strengthen the Economy

A persistent sore point within higher education is the complaint that politicians want higher education to be, “more geared to the needs of the economy” – the implication of this being that higher education is a public good in and of itself, which should hold itself above mere utilitarian concerns. This is a puzzling argument.  The arrival of state funding in the early nineteenth century was explicitly predicated on higher education being used as a tool to help strengthen the economy of

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April 15, 2013 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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