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Category: Universities

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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November 15, 2022 No Comments

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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November 9, 2022 No Comments

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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November 8, 2022 4 Comments

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

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

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