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Tag: Budget Cuts

PSE in Alberta – Part 1

With things in Ontario starting to calm down, Alberta is the next frontier in Canadian PSE changes.  The October budget asked institutions for some pretty significant mid-year adjustments, and if the already-published departmental business plan is anything to go by, it looks as though institutions are going to have to absorb several hundred million dollars more in cutbacks over the next couple of years.  How Alberta institutions react to this will be instructive, because they’ll be experiencing in fast-forward what

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November 28, 2019 No Comments

Scandinavian Round-Up

Every once in awhile it’s useful to take a look at how things are developing in other parts of the world.  Today, a quick trip to the three Scandinavian countries.  Norway is by some distance the most affluent of the Scandinavian countries, thanks to a few bazillion barrels of offshore oil.  But as the price of oil tumbles, financial pressures are appearing.  A wave of institutional mergers – touted not as a cost-saving measure but as a means to strengthen institutions

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November 5, 2019 No Comments

2019 Provincial Budget Roundup

Every year around this time, I do a simple piece summarizing all the provincial budgets.  I usually wait until all ten are done – so y’all get the full national picture – but unfortunately that’s not possible this year because neither PEI nor Alberta, both of whom quite recently acquired new administrations, are planning on getting budgets out the door before I break for the summer.   So, I figured I may as well get the whole thing – or 8

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May 15, 2019 2 Comments

How to Avoid Sounding Misinformed About Performance-Based Funding

Judging from various commentary I’ve seen/heard over the last few days, I suspect we’re all about to hear quite a lot of nonsense about Ontario’s proposed new Performance-based Funding (PBF) system.  Some of this is a natural consequence of the Conservatives announcing a general policy without announcing any details, which allows people’s imaginations to run rampant (and where Conservatives and higher education are concerned, academics’ imaginations can get pretty wild).  So, let’s just go through a few basics about PBF

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April 15, 2019 No Comments

The Bombshell in the Ontario Budget

Morning all.  Yesterday at Queen’s Park, Finance Minister Vic Fedeli brought in the Ontario Conservatives’ first budget of their new mandate.   There were cuts of various sorts, particularly in social services, but in many ways it was gentler than people expected: the plan involves getting the budget to balance in five years, which frankly is what the Liberals probably would have done anyway (though they wouldn’t have got there exclusively by reducing the spend side).  It’s not even a strict

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April 12, 2019 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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