Stephen J. Troop and Nell Gross argue that Canadian higher education is both in a better space and structured more appropriately to thrive instead of just survive the current economic conditions.

Some inevitable belt-tightening aside, Canadian policy makers at the federal and provincial levels are working hard to spare colleges and universities, preserving as much money as possible for research and operating expenditures and keeping tuition costs affordable. The reason? They recognize that a strong higher education system is key to long-term economic competitiveness and a successful society. If the United States doesn’t act soon to shore up its higher education sector, its loss will quickly become Canada’s — and other countries’ — gain.

That American colleges and universities have been hit hard by the economic crisis is clear. Private institutions saw the value of their endowments plummet. Public colleges and universities have fared far worse. The State of California, struggling under a $20 billion budget deficit, cut higher education funding by 6.8 percent in 2009-10, furloughing faculty and staff in both the University of California and California State University systems, reducing the number of slots for entering students, and raising tuition dramatically. Budget shortfalls in New York, New Jersey, Arizona, Florida and elsewhere have likewise meant millions of dollars in campus cutbacks.

Federal stimulus money helped cushion these blows, and an expansion of the Pell Grant program, opposed by many Republicans, has provided some relief to students. But the stimulus money is nearly spent, and with the recovery stalled out, American higher education seems destined for more pain in the years to come.

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

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Ontario, is the Canadian province with the most universities and colleges in Canada. Its 2010 budget provides $310M to add spaces for 20,000 more students in September, after already investing in this way over the past year. The new budget also contains funding to promote Ontario higher education internationally, and to support the implementation of a credit transfer system. All of this is within the Open Ontario Plan for Postsecondary Education.

Reinventing Brantford: A University Comes Downtown, is the story of a small North American town decaying and dying in the post-industrial revolution age, and how that downtown was reinvigorated by the creation of a downtown Brantford campus of Wilfred Leurier University. The introduction begins:

On June 7, 2008, the City of Brantford celebrated the death of its downtown. The funeral featured brightly coloured carriages, bicycles, and costumes . . . [R]epresentatives of the city, a new university campus, the arts community, and downtown churches blessed, eulogized, and toasted the old downtown. In a daring move the health authorities had approved the toast featuring untreated water taken from the Grand River two blocks away . . . The funeral celebrated the death, but also the rebirth of downtown Brantford.

If you purchase this book by following any link on this page, SCUP will receive a small percentage of your purchase price, which is not increased by doing so.

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Here is a collection, by province, of updates on the financial status of a number of Canadian colleges and universities. It is compiled and maintained by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

Browse it here:
http://www.aucc.ca/recession_e.html

This is a recent Educational Policy Institute monograph (PDF). To be cited as: Usher, Alex, and Duncan, Patrick (2008). Beyond the Sticker Shock: A Closer Look at Canadian Tuition Fees. Toronto, ON: Educational Policy Institute. Worth a read if you'd like to understand that costs and tuition look like in Canada.

In 2006 the Educational Policy Institute released the first edition of ‘Beyond the Sticker Price: A Closer Look at Canadian University Tuition Fees’. The report presented a new way by which to look at the prices and costs associated with university tuition, an alternative to the annual tuition fee report produced by Statistics Canada which more accurately reflects what students and their families actually pay in tuition fees once all various subsidies are taken into account.

The purpose of this paper is to build upon the research and analysis conducted for this paper’s original release. This paper will present available data from a ten year period from 199798 to 200708 and look at real changes in tuition fees, educational tax credits and tax rebate programs over that period. Of particular importance in this paper is the effect of the introduction of new tax rebate programs in four provinces since the last report. These programs have reduced the net cost of education substantially, particularly in Manitoba and New Brunswick. This new data will permit us to generate some alternative calculations of net tuition which are substantially more accurate as measures of cost than the simple tuition fee data. These measures, in turn, will permit us to see precisely how changing government policies on education tax credits and programs are affecting the people who receive them.

Beyond the campus (and, of course, covering campus as well), the following links will take you to places where you can soak up the current national Canadian perspective on news, events, and more:

Another Canadian organization with similar interests to those of many SCUPers is CIRPA. It doesn't publish a great many useful resources on its website, but its monthly newsletter are available as PDF documents on line. The latest, June 2008, has some interesting content, including: "Strategic Planning is a Long Term Project," a story about strategic planning centralization at Red Deer College; a review of an article in Tertiary Education and Management (original article by SCUPers James Taylor (recently deceased) and Maria Machado) titled "Article Review and Editorial on 'Higher Education Leadership and Management: From Conflict to Interdependence Through Strategic Planning"; and an interview with a new institutional analyst born in Shanghai, Jie Xiong. "CIRPA News" is a really nice newsletter.

In spite of welcome government investments in postsecondary education in recent years, revenues per student in the general operating budgets at Canadian universities are much lower than at American public universities.

The latest volume of Trends in higher education, released today by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada shows overall revenues to support teaching and research per student at Canadian universities have fallen significantly since the 1980s and have remained virtually unchanged since 2000. Canadian universities had $2,000 per student more than their U.S. public peers in 1980-81 and now have $8,000 less per student to fund teaching and research. Canadian universities also have less per student than U.K universities.