Category: Tuition

Community College Revenues, 2019-20

I haven’t looked at community college finances recently and Statistics Canada just released the most recent FINCOL survey data, so it’s good time to return to the subject.   I’ll stay focussed on the revenue side rather than the expenditures side, because frankly it is a lot more interesting (the expenditure side does not change much year to year and if you really want to examine that, take a look at Chapter 3 of The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada,

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Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 2: External Shocks

Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 2: External Shocks Broadly speaking, four external shocks contributed to Laurentian’s downfall.   First, the Barrie Campus and the costs associated with that experiment; second, the loss of 140 Saudi students in the summer of 2018 following the Canada-Saudi Twitter spat; third, the province’s decision to cut tuition by 10% in early 2019; and fourth, COVID.  I’ll add a fifth which was technically not a financial shock but certainly a waste of money.  Let’s go through each

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Affordability, 2021

StatsCan released its annual survey of tuition fees at universities last month (it does not bother to collect similar data with colleges, because reasons).  Average domestic undergraduate fees looked like this: Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition, by Province, 2021-22 Only two things to note here.  First, Ontario fees keep falling relative to other provinces because of the Ford government’s freeze on tuition (for which, hilariously, it continues to receive no political credit). For most of the past decade, Ontario was

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2021 PSE Platforms – the New Democratic Party

Last week, I analysed the Conservative Party of Canada platform.  This week, I am doing the New Democratic Party’s platform, which is available in its entirety here.    I find this manifesto disappointing because apparently the only thing New Democrats care about is making higher education cheaper.  Not better.  Not more adapted to helping Canadian business compete or Canadian society to become smarter.  Just cheap, cheaper, cheapest! In fairness, that’s at least partly because this manifesto is peculiarly written, in the sense that

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The Childcare Debate and PSE (part 2)

Yesterday, we looked at the state of childcare policy in Canada, at least in the event of a continued Liberal government.  Today I want to walk through what the precedent set by the new childcare accords might mean for higher education. Many, including myself, have long maintained that the idea of the federal government coming in creating a national policy on tuition – whether it be “lower than at present” or zero – was essentially impossible because it involves paying provinces

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