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Category: Institutions

Ontario Universities’ Looming Abyss

I am going to make two controversial claims.  The first is that the Ford government probably gets too much stick for its performance on higher education in its first term, and the second is that Ford’s second term looks set to be a LOT worse than the first.  Ready?  Here we go. The current Ford government in Ontario is often accused of “slashing funding” to universities.  However, as far as direct funding to institutions is concerned, the Ford government is

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October 24, 2022 2 Comments

Quality over Quantity

Yesterday, in talking about the global decline in post-secondary non-tertiary enrolments, I made the point that rising dependency ratios mean tighter labour markets, which in turn makes higher education more expensive due to higher foregone earnings. This, I noted, would put pressure on higher education to reduce the length of programs. The push for shorter programs will come both from individual learners and from employers and government.  For learners, it is because high wages mean high opportunity costs.  From a

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October 13, 2022 1 Comment

The Global Collapse in “College” Enrolments

One thing that’s been quite clear for awhile is that the Canadian community college sector has been seeing a decline in domestic enrolments for the better part of a decade.  Peak domestic community college enrolment was in 2012-13: by 2020-21 numbers were already down by over 10% and my understanding from chatting with people across the country is that domestic numbers have continued to decline in the past two years, quite substantially in some cases.  Obviously, many colleges have found

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October 12, 2022 8 Comments

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
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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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