Businesses have a pretty good way of knowing when to offer more or less of a good. It’s encapsulated in the equation MC = MR, and shown in the graphic below. Briefly, in the production of any good, unit-costs fall to start with as the benefits of economies of scale start to rise. Eventually, however, if production is expanded far enough you get diseconomies of scale, and the marginal cost begins to rise. Where the
A quick note: the OTTSYD will be on brief hiatus next week, as I’ll be in Japan and won’t have regular access to my computer. Not to worry, though, we’ll pick back up on the 18th. Anyways: I was asked recently what I thought was the most important challenge for post-secondary education in Canada at the moment. Resisting (barely) the flip answer “money”, I eventually settled on the allied concept of “learning how to promote economic growth and prosperity”. Now,
There are a lot of institutions facing a demographic challenge over the next few years. Outside the GTA and the B.C. lower mainland, the youth population is in decline, and that means institutions in these regions are either going to have to start increasing their yields or find some new markets to exploit. (Or, I suppose, cut their budgets a bit, but that seems to be a last resort.) Though I can’t claim to have a lot of granular detail
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