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Tag: Laurentian University

The Auditor General on Laurentian

Last Wednesday, the Ontario Auditor-General (AG) released a damning interim report on the Laurentian insolvency.  Because of its interim nature – the AG does not think it likely her office will finish a full report before the Legislature is prorogued for the June election – it does not do justice to the subject.  However, it does make three specific claims, which I think are hugely important and could pave the way for some key resignations at Laurentian.    For some time, I

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April 18, 2022 2 Comments

Those Two New Laurentian Reports

What Laurentian reports are we talking about now? Last summer, after the big round of layoffs at Laurentian, the administration said it wanted to do three big reviews before exiting CCAA protection – one for its real-estate portfolio, one for its overall operations, and one for its governance.  The first one, to my knowledge, has not been released, but the second and third were released last week.  You can see them here. Ok – anything you want to disclose before

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March 7, 2022 3 Comments

Ontario Applications Data 2022

Here are three interesting nuggets from last week’s Ontario University Application Centre’s data release. Long Term Trends Students, on average, are applying to a lot more institutions than they used to.  To wit, since 2016, the average number of applications per applicant was 4.7.  It’s now 5.6.  Figure 1: Direct-From-High-School Applications and Applicants, Ontario, 2012-2021 This doesn’t just mean an extra $5 million to OUAC in fees: it affects the way we have to analyse data from institutions.  You probably

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January 24, 2022 No Comments

Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 4 –Questions, Alternatives and Lessons

So, on January 31 last year Laurentian went into the CCAA process, thus bringing forward hundreds of millions of dollars in debts, and over the course of the next three months tore itself apart in the name of reaching solvency.  100-odd faculty were fired and a few dozen programs shut.  It was all extremely grim.  The question is: was it necessary and were there alternatives? Working backwards from the moment of insolvency, one can ask what happened and ask counterfactuals.

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January 20, 2022 4 Comments

Tracing Laurentian’s Path Part 3 : 2020/21

Laurentian was the first public university in Canada to close its campus in reaction to COVID.  On March 11, after the first case was identified, the institution decided to move to teaching at a distance.  Almost immediately, the consequences of COVID came into view.  The university had anticipated going into the new fiscal year with a combined $40 million in net deficits, line of credit owing, and “internal borrowing”, and now it was $45 million, with projected losses (at the

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January 19, 2022 No 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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