Category: Tuition

Where the Living is Easy

Before Christmas, I made a bit of a fuss about the six Ontario Colleges who had made deals with private career colleges in the GTA to teach international students.  The previous provincial government had decided to shut these agreements down because they seemed to pose systemic reputation risks to Ontario colleges, but the new one decided not only to leave them alone but to allow those colleges to double down on them, ostensibly on the grounds that they all really, really

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PSE in Alberta – Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at the history of post-secondary education in Alberta; today, I want to look more at some of the data on finances and student numbers, just to give you all a better sense of how the province compares to the rest of Canada. Let’s start with tuition fees.  For the last quarter-century or so, Alberta has stayed pretty close to the Canadian average.  Until 2013-14 it was above the average; since then, it has been below.  But the

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Scandinavian Round-Up

Every once in awhile it’s useful to take a look at how things are developing in other parts of the world.  Today, a quick trip to the three Scandinavian countries.  Norway is by some distance the most affluent of the Scandinavian countries, thanks to a few bazillion barrels of offshore oil.  But as the price of oil tumbles, financial pressures are appearing.  A wave of institutional mergers – touted not as a cost-saving measure but as a means to strengthen institutions

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Cape Breton, You Have to be Kidding Me

Faithful readers may remember my blog last year about Cape Breton University and how it doubled its international enrolment in one year, making an absolutely ludicrous amount of money in the process.  As a result of this phenomenal little piece of entrepreneurialism, Cape Breton has suddenly become hip in higher education circles, because the whole idea of anyone flooding into Sydney, Nova Scotia, let alone young people from halfway around the globe, is pretty astonishing to Sydneysiders as much as anyone else.  Whatever they’re

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2019 PSE Platforms-NDP

One of the tricky things about evaluating platforms in this election is that there is no way for anyone to know when a party is “done” with its announcements. They all get the PBO to cost bits of their platform, and that’s great. They can even, as the NDP has done, release a set of “commitments” (uncosted) and a vague “fiscal plan” (which basically says the party is going to stick to the Liberal formula of decreasing the deficit over

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