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Category: Institutions

University Expenditures 2020-21

Morning all.  Yesterday, we looked at details of university expenditures over time: today we will look at how universities spend their money.  I am not going to show any of this in dollar terms, because as can be inferred from yesterday’s blog, all spending is way up over the past couple of decades (about 90% after inflation), and it is up across almost every category of expenditure.  Instead, what I am going to do is express expenditures on various line

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September 28, 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

Fun With University Enrolment Data

Just for kicks, let’s look at undergraduate enrolment data in Canada, shall we?  Figure 1 shows enrolment trends at their very highest level: health and STEM subjects on the one hand and everything else (education, social sciences, business, humanities and fine arts) on the other.  Basically, over the past 30 years or so, STEM and health programs have gone from educating a little over one in four undergraduate students to educating a little over four in ten today.  Non-STEM/health fields

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September 21, 2022 1 Comment

Ontario Colleges (Yes, Again)

If you want a peek into how I spent my days, come, join with me on a quest to try to get Canadian institutional data in less than 3 years.  It’ll be fun, I promise.  It’s about Ontario Colleges, which are never not interesting. Let me show you two graphs which take us right up to the point where our national statistics agency’s data leaves off, 2019-20 (yes, really).  The first is international students as a percentage of Ontario’s total

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September 12, 2022 2 Comments

The Age of Volatility

Morning all.  Yes, the summer is over and classes are returning, but fortunately your daily intake of higher education commentary/snark/contrarianism is back as well.  I missed you guys, too. Anyways, welcome to the 2022-23 academic year.  This was supposed to be the year we got back to “normal”.  And the occasional campus mask mandate aside (which I fully approve), on the surface maybe this year will feel a bit 2019-ish.  But if you look underneath the hood, things are not

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August 29, 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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