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Category: Colleges and Polytechnics

College Finance Data, 2016-17

A few months ago, I promised you all an update on college finances when Statscan finally got around to updating its FINCOL tables.  Well, that day is here. Unlike universities, which have seen their budgets grow in real terms by about 25% over the last decade, growth in college budgets has been a lot slower – only about 14% – and nearly all that growth has come from student fees, since government support has been essentially flat.  In total, college

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January 14, 2019 No Comments

Canada’s Three Types of Colleges

If you’re in the business of trying to describe Canadian higher education, one of the hardest things to do is to try to explain Canada’s community college sector, since the institutions that comprise it vary substantially from one province to another. If one takes a historical approach, then there are, broadly speaking, three types of colleges in Canada.  There are Quebec’s CEGEPs, which are sui generis both in Canada and internationally.  Technically creatures of the 1960s, their roots go back over a

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September 17, 2018 2 Comments

Comparing College and University Funding

[the_ad id=”11745″] While I was putting together The State of Post-Secondary Education, 2018 I did a simple comparison looking at provincial government funding for universities and colleges, using data from FIUC and FINCOL (the Statscan surveys of the finances of universities and colleges, respectively)  Here’s what I found: Figure 1: Provincial Government Funding per Full-time Equivalent Student, 2015-16 I had a hard time believing this relatively small gap was actually true: everybody knows universities get more money from governments than colleges, right? But I

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September 13, 2018 1 Comment

Aurora College

The Government of the Northwest Territories published a Foundational Review of Aurora College, which is causing something of a stir north of 60.  Recent times have not been good for the college.  In early 2017, there was pressure from the Government to cut Social Work and Teacher Education programs (a decision later rescinded); soon afterwards the Government eliminated the college’s entire Board of Directors and replaced it with a single administrator before the review (one suspects there are a lot of stories here, but NWT

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June 12, 2018 1 Comment

Enrolment Trends in Rural/Remote Community Colleges

For giggles, every once in awhile I start looking at institutional enrolment data.  This weekend, I started looking specifically at community colleges.  I noted back here that enrolment in colleges nationally has been pretty flat for the last five years, but that’s a national picture only.  Start drilling down to the level of individual institutions, and things start getting pretty interesting. For the most part, it’s not hard to find data on individual college enrolments over time, even without paying extortionate fees

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April 3, 2018 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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