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Category: Tuition

Curves and Formulas

Time for a quick economics lesson. Every class in a post-secondary institution has a cost curve.  It looks something like this: Once an instructor is assigned to a class, that class has a set cost to the university regardless of how many students enroll, shown above as the Cost Curve (CC).  It’s mainly a function of the instructor’s salary and materials costs, which are very low in lecture courses, higher in laboratory courses, and highest in clinical courses.  That CC

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December 5, 2023 2 Comments

Important But Not Worth It? Some Thoughts

Last month, my colleague Andrew Parkin at the Environics Institute published a fascinating little piece entitled Is Post-secondary Education is a Waste of Time?, which looks at Canadians’ evolving views on the worth of higher education (Andrew is a former Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, so we can safely infer that this is not an expression of his own feelings) Environics asked two questions: “these days, a young person in Canada can’t expect to get

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November 6, 2023 2 Comments

Follow up on Quebec

If you just gauge public sentiment by twitter, it would seem the that CAQ’s policies on international and out-of-province students announced last Friday have a lot of support.  Certainly, someone was quick to put together a few infographics – highly inaccurate ones, to be sure – for use as memes.  But usually the arguments were phrased in terms of whatabbouteries: how expensive programs in Ontario were (usually based on cherry-picking the costs at, say, U of T Law and pretending

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October 19, 2023 7 Comments

That Big Quebec Policy Announcement

Many of you will have seen the stories on Friday concerning a set of policy changes aimed at reducing the number of non-permanent anglophone residents studying in Quebec (see La Presse, The Gazette).  The initial stories were not quite accurate in the sense that what the Government of Quebec announced in this stunningly unhelpful media release did not overtly single out anglophone institutions: they just in practice impact anglophone universities far more than francophone ones.  And what was announced on

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October 16, 2023 9 Comments

State of Postsecondary Education in Canada 2023

Rejoice, all!  For today is the publication for The State of Postsecondary in Education, 2023, your annual statistical guide to all things in our sector.  This year’s edition does not contain any new chapters or appendices, but we have expanded coverage of certain matters related to the student body, particularly with respect to gender and to international students.   With hundreds of pages and graphs, I know you’re going to be up all night reading it.  Try not to strain yourselves. 

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September 6, 2023 6 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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