Category: Institutions

The Affordability of Canadian Universities, Part 4

The final objection to the idea I’ve been pushing for the last couple of weeks – namely, that higher education might be getting more affordable (which it is, to some extent, by most tuition-related measures of affordability) – is that tuition-related measures of affordability are in adequate and don’t cover and so do not do justice to the current “the cost of living crisis”.  Broadly, this is true.  But, I suggest, it’s not actually true for everyone, and even for

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The Affordability of Canadian Universities, 2020, Part 2

Ok, so I got a little bit too excited in yesterday’s blog, when I indicated I could show how the increase in student aid spending since 2006 has improved affordability.  I forgot that while I do have aggregate data on grant expenditures across the country, data on how this money is split by institutional type is pretty scarce.  The Canada and Quebec student aid programs do publish data like this, but for some reason neither government chooses to leave older

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The Affordability of Canadian Universities, 2020, Part 1

The affordability of higher education is vital for the accessibility of higher education.  Unfortunately, much of the debate around affordability is conducted in terms simply of prices, and usually inflation-unadjusted ones at that.  But while price is an input to affordability, it is not the whole story.  In fact, it is exactly half the story: the numerator, if you will.  The other half, the denominator, is capacity to pay.  And yet for some reason we almost never bring this into

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The Alternative to International Students

No matter where I go, people ask me “what alternative financial models are there which don’t require us to go all-in on international students?”  Not because they have anything against international students, of course: rather, they just find the increasing reliance on this source of fee income as inherently more dangerous/volatile than other sources of income (though I’m not 100% sure that’s actually true). There are two alternatives, which can be combined in various ways.  One I have discussed at

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One Podcast to Start Your Day-SEM

Good morning.  Today is the start of an experiment here at HESA: podcasting.  Basically, the idea is to replace one blog every few weeks with a podcast and – for those of you who only want their morning higher ed intelligence in prose form – an edited highlights package in text form. For our inaugural pod, I asked York University’s Darran Fernandez (Assistant Vice Provost and University Registrar at York University), and the University of Alberta’s Melissa Padfield (Deputy Provost Students and

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