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Category: Universities

How International Tuition Fees Keep Canadian Universities Afloat

Everyone knows that international student numbers have been going up over the past decade or so. What you might not know is what kind of effect that’s having on university budgets. So, today, a few brief tables and charts. First, tuition fees for international undergraduate students. Nationally, these have been growing at a rate of inflation +4% over the past decade, which is substantially faster than the rise in domestic tuition (roughly, inflation +1.5%). Nationally, the average international tuition is

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December 12, 2016 4 Comments

Faculty Salary Data

We haven’t looked at Faculty salary data in awhile.  Time for a gander. Let’s compare data from the years 2009-2010 and 2014-15: a nice round five years.  The data for 2009-2010 is from the old Statistics Canada UCASS survey, discontinued but recently revived; the 2014-14 data is from the National Faculty Data Pool, an organization set up by Canadian Universities to keep the UCASS going after it was defunded.  I have restricted the sample to the 38 institutions which appear

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November 29, 2016 3 Comments

Canadian Enrollment Data, 2014-15

Statistics Canada published the 2014-15 enrollment data last week and I thought I would give you a bit of an overview.  The data is based on snapshots of enrollment taken in the fall, so we’re talking a 24-month lag here (most other OECD countries can do this in 12-18 months), but this is Statscan so just be glad you’re getting any data at all. The headline news is that enrollment in 2014-15 was up – barely – from 2.048 million

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November 28, 2016 3 Comments

Who’s More International?

We sometimes think about international higher education as being “a market”. This is not quite true: it’s actually several markets. Back in the day, international education was mostly about graduate students; specifically, at the doctoral level. Students did their “basic” education at home and then went abroad to get research experience or simply emigrate and become part of the host country’s scientific structure. Nobody sought these students for their money; to the contrary these students were usually getting paid in some

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November 24, 2016 1 Comment

Higher Salaries + Lower Workloads = More Sessionals

On Sunday night, the University of Manitoba and its faculty union hashed out a tentative deal to end a three-week strike.  No details are publicly available yet, but I think the dispute – and the likely strategies used to resolve it – are a useful way of understanding some general concepts around the economics of universities in Canada. Directly or indirectly, institutions get their operating funds from having students sit in classrooms.  Tuition fees are directly related to credit hours

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November 22, 2016 1 Comment
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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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