Category: Worldwide PSE

Education at a Glance, 2019: The Key Data

It’s that time of year when literally everyone is releasing data and reports for the back-to-school period (SELF-PROMOTION KLAXON: look for my new paper on Performance-Based Funding of post-secondary education, out from the CD Howe Institute Tuesday next week). Over the next couple of days, we’ll be doing a deep dive on Canadian university finances; today, though, I wanted to go through some of the highlights of this year’s Education at a Glance from the OECD, which dropped yesterday morning

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Canadian PSE Funding Is Weirder Than You Think

I’ve been playing around with funding data and discovered something a bit mind-altering.  It has to do with Ontario and how different it is from the rest of the country when it comes to post-secondary funding.  (All of the following graphs show income of PSE institutions – that’s colleges and universities together – from public and private sources expressed as a percentage of GDP.  Data for other countries come from OECD Education at a Glance 2018; data for Canadian provinces

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Delusional in Delhi

Last week, the Modi government in Delhi released a draft National Education Plan (NEP).  This is a big deal because the last new NEP came out over 30 years ago, and the Modi government has been promising a new one ever since it was first elected in 2014.  It’s also a big deal because it proposes some very big things, especially in higher education.  But Modi while has a reputation for talking up big goals, his track record on delivery is

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A New (ish) Argument About Debt and Tuition

As I am starting to sketch out the bones of my next book, (semi-serious working title: How Tuition Fees Will Save the World), I am collecting arguments about the nature and desirability of private contributions to higher education.  Most of the interesting stuff on that front right now is coming from the United States, which is of course sui generis as higher education systems go and so not necessarily applicable elsewhere, but its nonetheless vital to understand. Maybe the most

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Danger Ahead

Canadian universities and colleges like to congratulate themselves for their enormous success in increasing international student enrolments over the past few years.  And why not?  That success has brought Canadian institutions billions of dollars and allowed them to make up for roughly a decade of domestic tuition fee controls and stagnant core provincial funding. We have told ourselves a lot of stories over the last few years about why we have been so successful.  Many of them have to do

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