Answering the question of which provincial government spends the most on post-secondary education is trickier than it looks.  Not only do provinces differ in size (Ontario is roughly 95 times the size of Prince Edward Island), but they differ in terms of post-secondary participation rates, they differ in terms of the types of institutions they fund, and of course they differ in wealth and fiscal capacity.  So how can one sensibly compare these things?

(For those of you with sharp memories, yes, I have done this topic before, but it’s always good to revisit data every couple of years and I have a new twist or two for you).

The obvious way to normalize provincial expenditures is by student.  So, Figure 1 shows government expenditures on PSE institutions per full-time equivalent post-secondary student for 2015-2016 (which is the last year we have data for both colleges and universities). Nationally, the average is $12,306 per FTE student, though this average is dragged down substantially by Ontario, where the figure is $9,096 (and yes, that’s low, but institutions in Ontario are huge, and economies of scale make up for the gap to some extent).  Newfoundland, by some distance, comes out top, followed by Saskatchewan and then Alberta, though the first two of those have seen pretty major cuts in the last couple of years, so the gap probably is much less pronounced today.

Figure 1: Provincial Government Transfers to PSE Institutions per FTE Student, 2015-2016

Now one must be careful about relying on averages across all of PSE.  Provinces like Nova Scotia and Manitoba have PSE populations which are pretty heavily skewed towards colleges (which tend to receive slightly less money than universities, though the gap isn’t huge), whereas in Quebec it is the reverse.  So, let’s just take a peek at the disaggregated data (figure 2).  Some nuances emerge.  For instance, Nova Scotia looks a lot better on colleges expenditure and a lot worse on universities once you disaggregate; Newfoundland looks quite different depending on whether you look at universities or colleges, though some of that has to do with the very capital-intensive (and very cool) Marine Institute, etc.  But the basics of this story are still: Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and Alberta are tops, Ontario is bottom.

Figure 2: Provincial Govt. Transfers to PSE Institutions per FTE Student, by Institution Type, 2015-2016

Ok, now what happens if we try to measure provincial expenditures by their ability to pay – that is, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product? We explore this in figure 3, and, as you can see, a slightly different picture emerges.  Nationally, provinces spend 1% of GDP on post-secondary education, with about 70% of that on universities and the rest on colleges.  Again, this average is substantially dragged down by Ontario, which is a low outlier at just 0.77% of GDP.  But Saskatchewan and particularly Alberta look a lot less generous on this measure than on the previous one.  There are two reasons for that.  First, they have proportionately a lot fewer students than most other provinces (largely a function of having lots of young males preferring work to study) and second, they are a lot wealthier than other provinces.   Newfoundland is the one province that still looks good on this measure, but Quebec, PEI and Nova Scotia also rise to the top here.

Figure 3: Provincial Government Expenditures on PSE Institutions as a Percentage of GDP, 2015-2016

There is a way to combine these two measures, which sometimes gets used at the international level (UNESCO publications, mostly) though I’ve never seen it used within Canada.  It’s “expenditures per student as a % of GDP per capita”.  Think of it as: what percentage of the average citizen’s economic output does a provincial government spend in order to subsidize a single full-time student?  I show this calculation in figure 4.

Figure 4: Per-Student Provincial Transfers to Institutions as a % of GDP per Capita, 2015-16

Expressed this way, on average, Canada spends 21% of an average person’s working output to send one full-time student to post-secondary education.  Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island are up at 36%, New Brunswick (32%) also looks pretty good on this measure, while Saskatchewan, Alberta Quebec take up what amount to the median spots with at 27-28%.  But again, there is poor distant Ontario at just 15%.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that Ontario schools have less money than others or that Memorial University in Newfoundland has more.  This is just a representation of government money.  Throw tuition fees and self-generated income in there and you get a completely different and much less differentiated story; factor in differences in institutional size – that is, economies of scale – and mission and you probably get a different story again (I may come back to this soon).

But to answer the original question of “which government spends the most”, as of 2015-16 the answer was quite obviously Newfoundland.  A few years of cuts later that answer probably isn’t quite as clear-cut: Quebec or Prince Edward Island might be in with a shout, depending on which measure you chose to prioritize.  The laggard, however is crystal-clear: Ontario.  Even after fifteen years of allegedly education-friendly Liberal government, Ontario is in every other province’s rear-view mirror no matter what measure one chooses.   And it seems unlikely this situation will improve any time soon.