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Tag: Federalism

Notes for the NDP Leadership Race

As contestants start to jump into the federal NDP leadership race, it’s only a matter of time before someone starts promising free tuition to all across the land.  Now, I’m not going to rehash why free tuition is both regressive and undesirable (though if you really want to take a gander through the archives on free tuition, have a look here).  But I do think I can do some public service by talking about federalism and higher education, or rather:

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February 22, 2017 4 Comments

What Ottawa Spends

The Parliamentary Budget Officer did everyone a solid yesterday by publishing a really helpful compilation of federal government expenditures on higher education. According to the publication, the Government of Canada in 2013-14 spent $12.3 billion on post-secondary education (not including money for apprenticeships, training programs or labour market agreements; that includes $5.1 billion for “human capital measures”, which is mostly Canada Student Loans and Tax Expenditures of various kinds, $3.5 billion for research, three-quarters of which is from the granting

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May 6, 2016 No Comments

Solving the Fees Problem

So, here’s the problem: Canadian governments are mostly broke.  Even the ones that didn’t look broke a couple of months ago (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland) are now very definitely broke (especially Newfoundland).  There’s no money for PSE.  Everybody knows that. So, equally, everyone knows that the only way institutions are going to avoid a crunch is either by turning themselves into finishing schools for the Asian middle class, or by charging domestic students higher tuition fees.  No one genuinely thinks the

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December 3, 2014 No Comments

A Reminder Why Education, Skills, and Training are Provincial Responsibilities

We’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years talking about skills, skilled trades, skilled personnel, BAs vs. welders, jobs without people/people without jobs, and all kinds of other nonsense about education, training, and the labour market.  And to a large extent, when we argue about this stuff (and I’m including myself here), we’re arguing based on national-level data. But the labor market isn’t national. A recent paper by Kelly Foley and David Green made this point quite

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March 28, 2014 2 Comments

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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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