By Alex Usher. If you spend any time talking higher education policy in developing countries, the talk turns pretty quickly to the subject of “innovative methods of financing”. It’s easy to see why: money is always short, quality higher education costs a lot, and so these systems are always terribly squeezed.  Anyone holding out hope for “innovations” always gets a ready audience. More...

By Alex Usher. I got a lot of feedback on last week’s blog about provincial PSE spending comparisons.  So much so that a few of you asked for a bunch of other comparisons.  This blog does nothing but aim to please, so let’s get to it. More...

By Alex Usher. Recently, someone asked me what I thought Canada’s most iconic university building was.  That is, which building is a) instantly recognizable and b) utterly representative of the campus on which it sits?  I put the question out on twitter and got some interesting answers from my excellent and disputatious followers. More...

By Alex Usher. The government of Canada has essentially four mechanisms for transferring money to post-secondary institutions. The first, as discussed yesterday, is the indirect means of transfers to provinces.  The second is through the research granting councils: the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); as of 2018, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), which disburses money for scientific infrastructure, is now considered the fourth granting council. More...

By Alex Usher. A few weeks ago, the Parliamentary Budget Office put out a report (available here) on the sustainability of public finances.  It’s an excellent little report, with some key implications for post-secondary institutions across the country.  Today, I will discuss  two points in particular. More...

By Alex Usher. Last week, I got an email from the Atlantic Association of Universities.  “Great news!” it said.  “Enrollment in Atlantic Canadian universities rose by 2.4% last year!”  That’s pretty good, I thought to myself,  given the demographic crunch and all.  So, I clicked through on the document to get to where I can see the institution-by-institution data. More...

By Alex Usher. Transfers for PSE began in 1951 when the Government of Canada decided to devote 50 cents per capita to the task ($7.1 million in 1951 dollars, or about $65 million in today’s money).  This was not a transfer to provinces because Quebec Premier Duplessis – quite rightly – told the feds that the idea of tied transfers was a constitutional non-starter.  So to get around this problem, the National Conference of Canadian Universities (i.e Universities Canada, two name-changes ago) set up a shell organization called the Canadian Universities Fund, which took money from the feds and distributed it to universities directly, except in Quebec where Duplessis told institutions he’d cut their budgets dollar for dollar if they accepted the money. More...

By Alex Usher. Thanks for sticking with me through my highly unofficial and deeply idiosyncratic history of Canadian PSE. I suppose if it doesn’t meet standards of historical inquiry, at least you all now have a pretty good sense of my priorities when it comes to understanding developments in Canadian higher education. 
Looking back at the full sweep of Canadian PSE’s history, it’s worth thinking about the paths we didn’t take. From the first, we didn’t take the English route of having just a few elite residential colleges and three year degrees. At Confederation, there were already more universities in Canada than in England and by and large they were on the Scottish model not the English one. More...

By Alex Usher. The current era of PSE in Canada essentially took shape at the end of the Chretien Era.  There has been a little bit of evolution in institutional forms (this is the era in which “polytechnics” arrive and applied research becomes a thing at the college level, and several colleges were converted into universities) but really no change in system architecture. There are certainly budget changes – rapidly increasing in the period to about 2009, and then levelling off with international student fees replacing government grants thereafter – but they have been slow and incremental. More...

By Alex Usher. The Chretien era – roughly 1994 to 2003 – deserves to be remembered as a time of tremendous change in Canadian post-secondary education.  Or, as an enormous, stomach-churning, roller-coaster.  And though it is mighty odd that a federal politician defined an era in a field of what is essentially provincial, the record is clear. More...