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Category: Tuition

Classifying Tuition Fee Regimes

By Alex Usher and Jonathan Williams In the global discussion about tuition fees and cost-sharing, the most common – and the most simplistic – way to divide up countries is into countries which are “free tuition” and those which are not.  But it’s not actually anywhere near that simple.  When it comes to student fees, national systems vary along four axes.  First, the gross enrolment/participation rate; second the share of students attending public higher education institutions (worldwide, roughly a third

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March 16, 2022 2 Comments

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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February 1, 2022 No Comments

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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January 18, 2022 1 Comment

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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November 1, 2021 1 Comment

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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September 9, 2021 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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