By Alex Usher. So, last week (see here) I contrasted the fact that higher education was a consistent winner at the federal level over the past twenty years, and contrasted that with the fact that higher education had largely been a loser at the provincial level since about 2010 (and not just in the sense that funding is falling in real terms – also in terms of having the ability to offset those losses with higher fees). More...

By Alex Usher. I have been meaning to write about the new $2 billion “Strategic Investment Fund” (SIF), the 3-year infrastructure money-dump the Liberals announced in the budget.  However I waited a bit too long and Paul Wells beat me to it in an excellent little article called How to Spend $2 Billion on Research Really Quickly (available here). More...

By Alex Usher. Yesterday, I noted that  for the last few years provincial governments have refused to either increase funding to PSE institutions to keep up with inflation, or give institutions latitude to raise tuition to make up the difference. Effectively, provincial governments seem a lot more concerned with ensuring that post-secondary education is cheap than with ensuring that it continues to receive real increases in income. More...