If families looking to relocate to “top destinations” such as the US and Canada choose the right program for their children, they may be granted permanent residency as domestic students or even graduate from their chosen institution as residents or citizens, according to Tess Wilkinson, director of education services at Henley & Partners Education in the UK.
“We’re now seeing a real uptick in the types of families who are now becoming aware that there is an option for them,” she told The PIE News.
“For families looking at relocating, there can be real gains in the amount of fees they spend on education in places like Canada,” she explained. “They can they can save [up to] $150,000 on fees.”
The sheer number of clients asking for assistance in this area signals that education is swiftly becoming “one of the key drivers for people looking at second residences to citizenships”, she added.
Henley & Partners refers to itself as a “global leader in residence and citizenship by investment”. Its education arm, Wilkinson explained, helps to “advise transnational families who are looking for global education solutions”.
Working with families all over the world with children and adults of all ages – from K-12 to those seeking master’s degrees or MBAs – it “assists them to find the right match”, taking into account children’s individual needs and the types of residency or citizenship that may become available to its clients through educational opportunities.
“We can advise on all the top-tier destinations. So we have a family, for instance, who are considering the UK, the US and Australia and they’re putting in applications for all three countries,” Wilkinson shared.
We’re now seeing a real uptick in the types of families who are now becoming aware that there is an option for them Tess Wilkinson, Henley & Partners Education
With immigration policies in key markets such as the UK, the US, Canada and Australia shifting all the time, Wilkinson acknowledged that it “is not something that is simple”.
But she said that, with expertise across a number of key markets, Henley & Partners can provide families with education counsellors to help match children to institutions that suit them best, as well as help with applying to universities or summer programs.
The ‘big four’ international education destination countries are all seeing turbulence in their respective markets. Some of these restrictive policies are having an impact on students’ ability to study in the countries, hindering them from securing post-graduate residency in their chosen destination.
Australia and Canada are both subject restrictions on international students, while UK universities’ international departments have been blighted by a crackdown on overseas students’ ability to bring their families into the country with them.
Tess Wilkinson will be speaking at The PIE Live Europe at the PIEx Power Up Expanding horizons: accessing global education & opportunity via investment migrationon March 11 at 16:00. Tickets are available online here.
Back in the fall, StatsCan released a mess of data from the Labour Force Survey looking at education participation rates—that is, the percentage of any given age cohort that is attending education—over the past 25 years. So, let’s go see what it says.
Figure 1 shows total education participation rates, across all levels of education, from age 15 to 29, for selected years over the past quarter century. At the two ends of the graph, the numbers look pretty similar. At age 15, we’ve always had 95%+ of our population enrolled in school (almost exclusively secondary education, and from age 26 and above, we’ve always been in the low-tweens or high single digits. The falling-off in participation is fairly steady: for every age-year above 17, about 10% of the population exits education up until the age of 26. The big increase in education enrolments that we’ve seen over the past couple of decades has really occurred in the 18-24 range, where participation rates (almost exclusively in universities, as we shall see) have increased enormously.
Figure 1: Participation rates in Education (all institutions) by Age, Canada, select years 1999-00 to 2023-24
Figure 2 shows current participation rates by age and type of postsecondary institution. People sometimes have the impression that colleges cater to an “older” clientele, but in fact, at any given age under 30, Canadians are much more likely to be enrolled in universities than in colleges. Colleges have a very high base in the teens because of the way the CEGEP system works in Quebec (I’ll come back to regional diversity in a minute), and it is certainly true that there is a very wide gap in favour of universities among Canadians in their mid-20s. But while the part rate gap narrows substantially at about age 25, it is never the case that the college participation rate surpasses the university one.
Figure 2: Participation Rates by Age and Institution Type, Canada, 2023-24
Figure 3 shows college participation rates by age over time. What you should take from this is that there has been a slight decline in college participation rates over time in the 19-23 age range, but beyond that not much has changed.
Figure 3: College Participation Rates by Age, Selected Years, 1999-2000 to 2023-24
Figure 4 uses the same lens as figure 3 only for universities. And it’s about as different as it can be. In 1999, fewer than one in ten Canadians aged 18 was in university: now it is three in ten. In 1999, only one in four 21 year-olds was in university, now it is four-in-ten. These aren’t purely the effects of increased demand; the elimination of grade 13 in Ontario had a lot to do with the changes for 18-year-olds; Alberta and British Columbia converting a number of their institutions from colleges to universities in the late 00s probably juices these numbers a bit, too. But on the whole, what we’ve seen is a significant increase in the rate at which young people are choosing to attend universities between the ages of 18 and 24. However, beyond those ages the growth is less pronounced. There was certainly growth in older student participation rates between 1999-00 and 20011-12, but since then none at all.
Figure 4: University Participation Rates by Age, Selected Years, 1999-2000 to 2023-24
So much for the national numbers: what’s going on at the provincial level? Well, because this is the Labour Force Survey, which unlike administrative data has sample size issues, we can’t quite get the same level of granularity of information. We can’t look at individual ages, but we can see age-ranges, in this case ages 20-24. In figures 5 and 6 (I broke them up so they are a bit easier to read), I show how each province’s university and college participation rates in 2000 vs. 2023.
Figure 5: University Participation Rates for 20-24 Year-olds, Four Largest Provinces, 2000-01 vs. 2023-24
Figure 6: University Participation Rates for 20-24 Year-olds, Six Remaining Provinces, 2000-01 vs. 2023-24
Some key facts emerge from these two graphs:
The highest participation rates in the country are in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia.
In all provinces, the participation rate in universities is higher than it is for colleges, ranging from 2.5x in Quebec for over 4x in Saskatchewan.
Over the past quarter century, overall postsecondary participation rates and university participation rates have gone up in all provinces; Alberta and British Columbia alone have seen a decline in college participation rates, due to the aforementioned decision to convert certain colleges to university status in the 00s.
Growth in participation rates since 2000 has been universal but has been more significant in the country’s four largest provinces, where the average gain has been nine percentage points, and the country’s six smaller provinces, where the gain has been just under five percent.
Over twenty-five years, British Columbia has gone from ninth to second in the country in terms of university participation rates, while Nova Scotia has gone second to ninth.
New Brunswick has consistently been in last place for overall participation rates for the entire century.
Just think: three minutes ago, you probably knew very little about participation rates in Canada by age and geography, now you know almost everything there is to know about participation rates in Canada by age and geography. Is this a great way to start your day or what?
Note: this is a short version of a paper which has just appeared in issue 72:4 the Canadian Tax Journal. How short? I’m trying for under 1000 words. Let’s see how I do.
Canadian student aid programs existed in scattered forms since just after World War I but became a “national program” when the Dominion-Canadian Student Aid Program (DCSAP) was created in 1939. Under this program, the Government of Canada provided block cash grants to provinces who administered their own scholarship programs which provided aid based on some combination of need and merit. The actual details of the program varied significantly from one province to another; at the time, the government of Canada did not place much importance on “national programs” with common elements.
In 1964, this DCSAP was replaced by the Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP)—recently re-named the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP). This has always been a joint federal-provincial enterprise. But where the earlier program was a block grant, this program would be a single national entity run more or less consistently across all provinces, albeit with provincial governments still in place as responsible administrative agencies able to supplement the plan as they wished. Some provinces would opt out of this program and received compensation to run their own solo programs (Quebec at the program’s birth, the Northwest Territories in 1984 and Nunavut in 1999). The others, for the most part, built grant programs that kicked in once a student had exhausted their Canada Student Loan eligibility.
Meanwhile, a complimentary student aid program grew up in the tax system, mainly because it was a way to give money to students that didn’t involve negotiations with provinces. Tuition fees plus a monthly education amount were made into a tax deduction in 1961 and then converted to a tax credit in 1987. Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs), which are basically tax-free growth savings accounts, showed up in 1971.
Although the CSLP was made somewhat more generous over time in order to keep up with rising student costs, program rules went largely unchanged between 1964 and 1993. Then, during the extremely short Kim Campbell government, a new system came into being. The federal government decided to make loans much larger, but also to force provinces in participating provinces to start cost-sharing in a different manner—basically, they had to step up from a student’s first dollar of need instead of just taking students with high need. Since this was the era of stupidly high deficits, provinces responded to these additional responsibilities by cutting the generosity of their programs, transforming from pure grants to forgivable loans. For the rest of the decade, student debt rose—in some cases quite quickly: in total loans issued doubled between 1993 and 1997.
And then, everything went into reverse.
In a series of federal budgets between 1996 and 2000, billions of dollars were thrown into grants, tax credits and a new program called “Canada Education Savings Grants,” which were a form of matching grant for contributions to RESPs. Grants and total aid rose; loans issued fell by a third, mainly between 1997 and 2001 (a recovering economy helped quite a bit). Tax expenditures soared, which due to a rule change allowing tax credits to be carried forward meant either students got to keep more of their work income or got to reduce their taxes once they started working.
Since this period of rapid change at the turn of the century, student aid has doubled in real terms. And nearly all of that has been an increase in non-repayable aid. Institutional scholarships? Tripled. Education scholarships? Quadrupled. Loans? They are up, too, but there the story is a bit more complicated.
Figure 1: Student Aid by Source, Canada, 1993-94 to 2022-23, in thousands of constant $2022
For the period from about 2000 to 2015, all forms of aid were increasing at about inflation plus 3%. Then, in 2016, we entered another period of rapid change. The Governments of Canada and Ontario eliminated a bunch of tax credits and re-invested the money into grants. Briefly, this led to targeted free tuition in Ontario, before the Ford government took an axe to the system. Then, COVID hit and the CSFAP doubled grants. Briefly, in 2020-21, total student aid exceeded $23 billion/year (the figure above does not include the $4 billion per year paid out through the Canada Emergency Student Benefit), with less than 30% of it made up of loans.
One important thing to understand about all this is that while the system became much larger and much less loan-based, something else was going on, too. It was becoming much more federal. Over the past three decades, provincial outlays have risen about 30% in real terms; meanwhile, federal ones have quadrupled. In the early 1990s, the system was about 45-55 federal-provincial; now, it’s about 70-30 federal. It’s a stunning example of “uploading” of responsibilities in an area of shared-jurisdiction.
Figure 2: Government Student Aid by Source, Figure 1: Student Aid by Source, Canada, 1993-94 to 2022-23, in thousands of constant $2022
So there you go: a century of Canadian student aid in less than 850 words. Hope you enjoyed it.
Most of the time when I talk about the history of university financing, I show a chart that looks like this, showing that since 1980 government funding to the sector is up by a factor of about 2.3 after inflation over the last 40-odd years, while total funding is up by a factor of 3.6.
Figure 1: Canadian University Income by source, 1979-80 to 2022-23, in billions of constant $2022
That’s just a straight up expression of how universities get their money. But what it doesn’t take account of are changes in enrolment, which as Figure 2 shows, were a pretty big deal. Universities have admitted a *lot* more students over time. The university system has nearly doubled since the end of the 1990s and nearly tripled since the start of the 1990s.
Figure 2: Full-time Equivalent Enrolment, Canada, Universities, 1978-79 to 2022-23
So, the question is, really, how have funding pattern changes interacted with changes in enrolment? Well, folks, wonder no more, because I have toiled through some unbelievably badly-organized excel data to bring you funding data on this that goes back to the 1980s (I did a version of this back here, but I only captured national-level data—the toil here involved getting data granular enough to look at individual provinces). Buckle up for a better understanding of how we got to our present state!
Figure 3 is what I would call the headline graph: University income per student by source, from 1980-81 to the present, in constant $2022. Naturally, it looks a bit like Figure 1, but more muted because it takes enrolment growth into account.
Figure 3: University income per student by source, from 1980-81 to the present, in constant $2022
There’s nothing revolutionary here, but it shows a couple of things quite clearly. First, government funding per-student has been falling for most of the past 40 years.; the brief period from about 1999 to 2009 stands out as the exception rather than the norm. Second, despite that, total funding per student is still quite high compared with the 1990s. Institutions have found ways to replace government income with income from other sources. That doesn’t mean the quality of the money is the same. As I have said before, hustling for money incurs costs that don’t occur if governments are just writing cheques.
As usual, though, looking at the national picture often disguises variation at the provincial level. Let’s drill one level down and see what happened to government spending at the sub-national level. A quick note here: “government spending” means *all* government spending, not just provincial government spending. So, Ontario and Quebec probably look better than they otherwise would because they receive an outsized chunk of federal government research spending, while the Atlantic provinces probably look worse. I doubt the numbers are affected much because overall revenues from federal sources are pretty small compared to provincial ones, but it’s worth keeping in mind as you read the following.
Figure 4 looks at government spending per student in the “big three” provinces which make up over 75% of the Canadian post-secondary system. Nationally, per-student spending fell from $22,800 per year to $17,600 per year. But there are differences here: Ontario spent the entire 42-year period below that average, while BC and Quebec spent nearly all that period above it. Quebec has notably seen very little in terms of per-student fluctuations, while BC has been more volatile. Ontario saw a recovery in spending during the McGuinty years, but then has experienced a drop of about 35%. Of note, perhaps is that most of this decline happened before the arrival of the current Ford government.
Figure 4: Per-Student Income from Government Sources, in thousands of constant $2022, Canada and the “Big Three” provinces, 1980-81 to 2022-23
Figure 5 shows that spending volatility was much higher in the three oil provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland & Labrador. All three provinces spent virtually the entirety of our period with above-average spending levels but the gap between these provinces and the national average was quite large both in the early 1980s and from about 2005 onwards: i.e. when oil prices were at their highest. Alberta of course has seen per-student funding drop by about 50% in the last fifteen years, but at the same time, it is close to where it was 25 years ago. So, was it the dramatic fall or the precipitous rise that was the outlier?
Figure 5: Per-Student Income from Government Sources, in thousands of constant $2022, Canada and the “Oil provinces”, 1980-81 to 2022-23
Figure 6 shows the other four provinces for the sake of completeness. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were the lowest spenders in the country for most of the period we’re looking at, only catching up to the national average in the mid-aughts. Interestingly, the two provinces took two different paths to raise per-student spending: Nova Scotia did it almost entirely by raising spending, while in New Brunswick this feat was to a considerable extent “achieved” by a significant fall in student numbers (this is a ratio, folks, both the numerator and the denominator matter!).
Figure 6: Per-Student Income from Government Sources, in thousands of constant $2022, Canada and selected provinces, 1980-81 to 2022-23
An interesting question, of course, is what it would have cost to have kept public spending at 1980 per-student levels. And it’s an interesting question, because remember, total spending did in fact rise quite substantially (see Figure 1): it just didn’t rise as fast as student numbers. So, in Figure 7, I show what it would have cost to keep per-student expenditures stable at 1980-81 levels both if student numbers had stayed constant, and what it would have meant in practice given actual student numbers.
Figure 7: Funds required to return to 1980-81 levels of per-student government investment in universities, Canada, in millions of constant $2022
Weird-looking graph, right? But here’s how to interpret it. Per-student public funding did fall in the 80s and early 90s. But it rose again in the early aughts, to the point where per-student funding went back to where it was in 1980, even though the number of students in the system had doubled in the meanwhile. From about 2008 onwards, though, public investment started falling off again in per-student terms, going back to mid/late-90s levels even as overall student numbers continued to rise. We are now at the point where getting back to the levels of 1980-81, or even just 2007-08, would require a rise of between $6 and $6.5 billion dollars.
Anyways, that’s enough sunshine for one morning. Have a great day.
I don’t know about you, but I find all the writing about the Trudeau legacy pretty goddamn annoying. Weeks and weeks of columnists yelling “resign!” followed by weeks and weeks of the same columnists yelling “he didn’t do it fast enough!” All true; all deeply boring. But since this is basically the blog of record for the sector, it would be weird to let the man leave without an assessment of his effect.
So here goes:
The early years
A lot of people were probably more excited about Trudeau’s win in 2015 than they should have been. The Chretien/Martin regime of the late 1990s and early 2000s was the most pro-science /education in Canadian history. In comparison, the Conservative government of Harper government seemed pretty bad, even though its record on funding postsecondary education was much better than it usually got credit for (its attitude towards government scientists was a different matter entirely). A lot of people assumed that a new Liberal government was just going to reset to the status quo ante, even if that was never really very likely.
There was one great move early on, with respect to phasing out (untargeted) education tax credits and investing the proceeds in income-targeted student grants, a measure which allowed some provinces (like Ontario and New Brunswick) to at least temporarily (until vindictive Conservative governments came to power) re-arrange their aid programs to deliver targeted free-tuition programs for lower-income students. This saved the government money over the course of the Liberals’ first term (it was meant to be revenue-neutral, but that depended on an increase in spending in the 2019 budget which didn’t happen until the COVID emergency—see below).
The Liberals did a lot of other stuff in that first Trudeau term; just not much that was either coherent or lasting. On research funding, the government asked former U of T President David Naylor to advise them on how to run research councils, and when he did they proceeded to take about two-thirds of his advice on the actual amount of funding and well under a quarter of what he recommended in terms of how to manage that funding (it totally ignored the bit about giving up its boutique funding programs, for instance). On its prime innovation strategy—the so-called “superclusters,” which still exist, now devoid of any regional dimension—which the deeply problematic techbro-loving Minister of the era, Navdeep Bains, would create a set of “made-in-Canada silicon valleys”, well…you can read about them here, but they are so embarrassing it’s probably better to pass over them in silence.
There was a lot of money thrown at Skills Training in Budget 2017 and most of it seemed reasonably sensible, but it’s hard to work out how much good any of it did. This government—unlike the Martin/Chretien Liberals—really doesn’t like evaluating its own spending. And certainly the government never really followed this up or turned it into something coherent. An attempt to create a national training benefit in Budget 2019 which seemed like a promising idea at the time but has basically dissolved into thin air because there has been little attempt to promote the program(s). Steps were taken towards better funding for indigenous postsecondary education, but that effort subsequently got bogged in the details.
And this is pretty much the story of Liberal policymaking in general in postsecondary education (and arguably a lot of other policy fields, too): lots of good ideas, not very good at sustaining the attention necessary to execute them properly and make them work. This is what happens when you govern according to the 24-hour news cycle and not the long-term success of the nation.
The COVID Years (Second term)
Less than six months after being narrowly re-elected in 2019, COVID arrived. Broadly speaking, the government’s initial instincts were pretty good: do anything to keep the economy going while we figured out how to live with the virus and waited for the vaccines to arrive. In higher education, that meant pouring a ton of money into an emergency student aid benefit (the Canada Emergency Student Benefit) than turned out to be actually necessary (see my take on what really happened during covid and emergency benefits). I’m not particularly inclined to see this as a failure: hindsight is easy, but given how crazy everything was in spring 2020 I’m inclined to give them a pass on one-time cash handouts. Same with the backstopping of university research expenditures in this period.
What was less forgivable was the tendency to view the brief shift of the Overton Window towards government intervention either as something semi-permanent or as an invitation to extreme hubris. The decision to double the Canada Education Student Grant from $3000 per year to $6000 per year for 2020-21 was probably justifiable: extending it for another two years and then abruptly cancelling it in the 2023 budget was probably not. And then of course there was the WE Charity/Canada Student Summer Grant fiasco. Hubris combined with a lack of execution will kill you every time.
Post-COVID (Third term)
The Liberals narrowly won the 2021 election and then basically went to sleep until the summer of 2023 when it suddenly dawned on them that they were hated by pretty much the entire country, mainly because of inflation but especially housing inflation which was blamed (with some justification) on a rapid influx of international students, particularly (but not exclusively) to Ontario Community Colleges. The influx was not the Liberals’ fault in the least—for this you can blame some combination of a decade or more of provincial underfunding and some truly wild-ass empire-building by a handful of college Presidents—but they were somewhat slow to react. Somehow, they got tagged with responsibility for the problem, and so their Immigration Minister, Marc Miller, set out to solve it.
And so in January 2024, with all of the wit and wisdom that comes from occupying the strategic intersection between arrogance and ignorance in which official Ottawa perpetually resides, by gum, the Trudeau introduced a solution (actually two: there was a second policy package in September which was designed specifically to screw with the college sector). It was a national solution to an essentially regional (southern Ontario) problem, and it hammered postsecondary finances across the country. Some of it was necessary; much of it was not. My estimate of the changes are in the range of $3-4 billion range, with job losses in the tens of thousands. And to a considerable extent, it was the violent, sudden change in international policy combined, deliberately adopted in a manner which was contemptuous of the sector, which is how this Government will be remembered by the sector.
Meanwhile, the feds went on an epic bout of fumbling the research and innovation files. In election 2021, Trudeau promised a Canadian version of DARPA. Budget 2022 turned that into a new Canada Innovation Corporation, which was then basically punted into the long grass because, well, Trudeau couldn’t focus long enough to figure out how to make it work. Then, Inflation ate away the entire value of the big Naylor-induced research package of 2018. That led to a new research package in Budget 2024 worth $1.8 billion (88% of which does not come online until after the next election, it’s so anyone’s guess how much of it ever materializes), accompanied by a raft of new ideas from a panel chaired by Frédéric Bouchard about how to manage curiosity-driven research. The money has now been allocated (in theory), but the feds are not close to working out changes to management. All was supposed to be revealed in the 100% unlamented Fall Economic Statement, but again the Liberals punted. Couldn’t make a decision.
(Simultaneously, the government utterly botched the roll out of the Strategic Science Fund. No one has ever written about this and I’m not going to tell tales out of school—at least not today—but trust me, this was a time-wasting fiasco of enormous proportions.)
The Verdict
At the end of the first term, I compared the Trudeau record with that of the Harper government, and noted that the difference wasn’t as big as you’d think—probably more about vibes than about money (I got some snotty “how dare you” comments from Liberal partisans on that one). And I think that’s still my verdict. The Trudeau government wanted to be known as “pro-Science” and “pro-education.” It just didn’t want to put in the money or the sustained policy attention required to actually be effective. Sometimes the casual inattention to policy details just made spending ineffective; sometimes (as in the case of international student visas) it hurt institutions.
Either way, the cavalier attitude to substance began to wear thin a long time ago. I don’t think many in the post-secondary sector will view the Trudeau era with much fondness.
StatsCan dropped some college financial data over the XMAS holidays. I know you guys are probably sick of this subject, but it’s still good to have some national data—even if it is eighteen months out of date and doesn’t really count the last frenzied months of the international student gold rush (aka “doing the Conestoga”). But it does cover the year in which everyone now agrees student visa numbers “got out of control,” so there are some interesting things to be learned here nonetheless.
To start, let’s look quickly at college income by source. Figure 1, below, shows that college income did rise somewhat in 2022-23, due mainly to an increase in tuition income (up 35% between the nadir COVID year of 20-21 and 22-23). But overall, once inflation is taken into account, the increase in college income really wasn’t all that big: about a billion dollars in 2021-22 and about the same again in 2022-23, or about 6-7% per year after inflation. Good? Definitely. Way above what universities were managing, and well above most sectors internationally? But it’s not exactly the banditry that some communicators (including the unofficial national minister of higher education, Marc Miller) like to imply.
Figure 1: College Income by Source, Canada, 2017-18 to 2022-23, in Billions of $2022
Now I know a few of you are looking at this and scratching your heads, asking what the hell is going on in Figure 1. After all, haven’t I (among others) made the point about record surpluses in the college sector? Well, yes. But I’ve only ever really been talking about Ontario, which is the only province where international tuition fees have really taken flight. In Figure 2, I put the results for Ontario and for the other nine provinces side-by-side. And you can see how different the two are. Ontario has seen quite large increases in income, mainly through tuition fees and by ancillary income bouncing back to where it was pre-COVID, while in the other nine provinces income growth is basically non-existent in any of the three categories.
Figure 2a/b. College Income by Source, Ontario vs Other Nine Provinces, 2017-18 to 2022-23, in Billions of $2022
(As an aside, just note here that over 70% of all college tuition income is collected in the province of Ontario, which is kind of wild. At the national level, Canada’s college sector is not really a sector at all…their aims, goals, tools, and income patterns all diverge enormously.)
Figure 3 drills down a little bit on the issue of tuition fee income to show where they have been growing and where they have not. One might look at this and think its irreconcilable with Figure 2, since tuition fees in the seven smaller provinces seem to be increasing at a rate similar to Ontario. What that should tell you, though, is that the base tuition from which these figures are rising are pretty meagre in the seven smallest provinces, and quite significant in Ontario. (Also, remember that in Ontario, domestic tuition fees fell by over 20% or so after inflation between 2019-20 and 2022-23, so this chart is actually underplaying the growth in international fees in that province a bit.)
Figure 3: Change in Real Aggregate Tuition Income by Province, 2017-18 to 2022-23, (2017-18 = 100)
Now I want to look specifically at some of the data with respect to expenditures and to try to ask the question: where did that extra $2.2 billion that the sector acquired in 21-22 and 22-23 (of which, recall, over 70% went to Ontario alone) go?
Figure 4 answers this question in precise detail, and once again the answer depends on whether you are talking about Ontario or the rest of the country. The biggest jump in expenditures by far is “contracted services” in Ontario—an increase of over $500M in just two years. This is probably as close a look as we will ever get at the economics of those PPP colleges that were set up around the GTA since most of this sum is almost certainly made up of public college payments to those institutions for paying the new students had arrived in those two years. If you assume the increase in international students at those colleges was about 40,000 (for a variety of reasons, an exact count on this is difficult), then that implies that colleges were paying their PPP partners about $12,500 per student on average and pocketing the difference, which would have been anywhere between about $2,500 and $10,000, depending on the campus and program. And of course, most of the funds spent on PPP were spent one way or another on teaching expenses for these students.
Figure 4: Change in Expenditures/Surplus, Canadian Colleges 2022-23 vs 2020-21, Ontario vs. Other 9 Provinces, in millions of 2022
On top of that, Ontario colleges threw an extra $300 million into new construction (this is a bit of an exaggeration because 2020-21 was a COVID year and building expenses were abnormally low), and an extra $260 million (half a billion in total) thrown into reserve funds for future years. This last is money that probably would have ended up as capital expenditures in future years if the feds hadn’t come crashing in and destroying the whole system last year but will now probably get used to cover losses over the next year or two instead. Meanwhile, in the rest of Canada, surpluses decreased between 2020-21 and 2022-23, and such spending increases as occurred came mostly under the categories “miscellaneous” and “ancillary enterprises.”
2022-23 of course was not quite “peak international student” so this analysis can’t quite tell the full story of how international students affected colleges. We’ll need to wait another 11 months for that data to show up. But I doubt that the story I have outlined based on the data available to date will not change too much. In short, the financials show that:
Colleges outside Ontario were really not making bank on international students.
Within Ontario, over a third of the additional revenue from international students generated in the 2020-21 to 2022-23 period was paid out to PPP partners, who would have spent most of that on instruction.
Of the remaining billion or so, about a third went into new construction and another 20% was “surplus,” which probably meant it was intended for future capital expenditure.
The increase in core college salary mass was miniscule—in fact only about 3% after inflation.
If there was “empire building” going on, it was in the form of constructing new buildings, not in terms of massive salary rises or hiring sprees.
In a word: no, India’s claims do nothing of the sort. And the stories that CBC has been running on the issue border on journalistic malpractice.
All of this coverage is an outgrowth of the so-called “Dingucha” case in which a family of four from the village of Dingucha in Gujarat died while trying to cross the Canada-US Border illegally near Emerson Manitoba in 2022. One member of the family was in Canda on a student visa and was able to bring his spouse (and thus his children) on open work permits.
The hook for the stories that ran over Christmas was a spate of pieces that ran in the Indian press about the case, like this one from NDTV and this one from The Indian Express. They all say basically the same thing, and CBC parroted them word-for-word (there does not appear to have been any attempt by the CBC to report the story from India). Here’s the heart of what CBC said:
India’s Enforcement Directorate said in a news release on Tuesday it had uncovered evidence of human trafficking involving two “entities” in Mumbai after probing the Indian connection to the Patel family, who froze to death in January 2022 while trying to cross the border from Manitoba into Minnesota during frigid weather conditions.
The Enforcement Directorate said its investigation found that about 25,000 students were referred by one entity, with over 10,000 students referred by another entity to various colleges outside India every year.
Arrangements would be made for the Indian nationals to be admitted to Canadian colleges and universities and apply for student visas, according to the Enforcement Directorate.
But once the Indian nationals reached Canada, instead of joining the college, they illegally crossed the border from Canada into the U.S. and the fee received by the Canadian schools was remitted back to the individuals’ account, the Enforcement Directorate said.
Based on this, CBC got a bunch of “experts” to say a variety of things which put colleges and student visas generally in a bad light. I’ll get to those in a moment, but before we do that, let’s just point out a few things wrong with the story’s framing here.
First, and most importantly, this is all reporting on a press release from the Indian Enforcement Directorate (ED). The ED is not the police; it’s part of the Revenue Ministry. To quote its website, “it is a multi-disciplinary organization mandated with investigation of offence of money laundering and violations of foreign exchange laws.” It is unclear what its connection to a murder investigation might be, and curiously, this is a question CBC never appears to have asked.
(In this same vein, while the ED is in theory non-partisan, it has been accused in India of being used as a tool of the ruling BJP. Could the CBC not think of any reason why a Modi-aligned agency might have a reason to make false and defamatory claims about Canada? Really?)
Second, this press release provides no actual evidence provided here about, well, anything. There are “entities” that refer people abroad for study? No shit, Sherlock. They are called agents. They do it all the time. And while there is no question that the Patels (and presumably others who have crossed the border in the past) got to Canada on a student visa, no evidence has been provided showing that any of these agents are in league with human smugglers based in North America. (Note: the press release is very badly drafted, but I think a fair read of it is that it implies that Canadian institutions were aware of the scheme and were implicitly part of it. Needless to say, there is less than zero evidence of this).
Basically: We’ve known for a couple of years now Indian citizens come to Canada on a student visa and then broke the law by trying to enter the US illegally. Exactly no new evidence was provided by the ED in its press release. It is not impossible that such evidence exists, of course, but for the moment no such evidence has been produced.
So why did the CBC react as if it did?
This was the question I asked them when a CBC producer tried to get me to comment on the story on December 27th. Why would you do a story on so little evidence? I said I didn’t think the evidence merited a story but agreed to speak to them if they wanted someone to explain exactly why the evidence was so thin. You will no doubt be shocked to learn that CBC then declined to interview me.
Upon reading the story, it’s not hard to understand why. With zero evidence, they got a bunch of experts to repeat talking points about the awfulness of student visas that they’ve been repeating for months now.
Raj Sharma, a Calgary-based immigration lawyer, told said “If the allegations are true, it reveals shocking gaps in our integrity protocols.… This is deeply, deeply concerning and problematic,” adding that the allegations suggest “wide-scale human smuggling.”
(The “if” in that sentence is doing a hell of a lot of work – AU)
Kelly Sundberg, a former Canada Border Services Agency officer who is a professor of criminology at Mount Royal University, said the system has no oversight and is “being exploited” by transnational criminals. “This type of fraud, of gaming our immigration system has been going on for quite some time actually,” he said, noting that the volume of those potentially involved “is staggering.”
Ken Zaifman, a Winnipeg-based immigration lawyer, says that from his experience, the responsibility of oversight should lie with the educational institutions, but that they did not do so because “they were addicted to international students to fund their programs.”
Ok, so, these comments about fraud and oversight are worth examining. I’m trying to imagine how either the government of Canada or an educational institution could legitimately “prevent fraud” or “exercise oversight” in a case like this one. Are colleges and universities supposed to be like the pre-cogs in the movie Minority Report,able to spot criminals before they commit a crime? I mean, there is a case to be made that in the past Canada made such cross-border runs more tempting by allowing students’ entire families to join them in Canada while studying (as was the case in the Dingucha affair), but that loophole was largely closed ten months ago when the feds basically stopped giving open work permits to partners of students unless they were enrolled in a graduate degree.
Anyways, this is where we are now: our national broadcaster sees no problem running evidence-free stories simply as a platform to beat up on public colleges because that’s a great way to get clicks. Crappy journalism? Sure. But it’s also evidence of the disdain with which Canadian PSE institutions are now viewed by the broader public: CBC wouldn’t run such a thin story unless it thought the target was “soft.” And there’s no solution to our funding woes until this gets sorted out.
Last month, right around the time the blog was shutting down, the OECD released its report on the second iteration of the Programme for International Assessment for Adult Competencies (PIAAC), titled “Do Adults Have the Skills They Need to Thrive in a Changing World?”. Think of it perhaps as PISA for grown-ups, providing a broadly useful cross-national comparison of basic cognitive skills which are key to labour market success and overall productivity. You are forgiven if you didn’t hear about it: its news impact was equivalent to the proverbial tree falling in a forest. Today, I will skim briefly over the results, but more importantly, ponder why this kind of data does not generate much news.
First administered in 2011, PIAAC consists of three parts: a test for literacy, numeracy, and what they call “adaptive problem solving” (this last one has changed a bit—in the previous iteration it was something called “problem-solving in technology-rich environments). The test scale for is from 0 to 500, and individuals are categorized as being in one of six “bands” (1 through 5, with 5 being the highest, and a “below 1,” which is the lowest). National scores across all three of these areas are highly correlated, which is to say that if country is at the top or bottom, or even in the middle on literacy, it’s almost certainly pretty close to the same rank order for numeracy and problem solving as well. National scores all cluster in the 200 to 300 range.
One of the interesting—and frankly somewhat terrifying—discoveries of PIAAC 2 is that literacy and numeracy scores are down in most of the OECD outside of northern Europe. Across all participating countries, literacy is down fifteen points, and numeracy by seven. Canada is about even in literacy and up slightly in numeracy—this is one trend it’s good to buck. The reason for this is somewhat mysterious—an aging population probably has something to do with it, because literacy and numeracy do start to fall off with age (scores peak in the 25-34 age bracket)—but I would be interested to see more work on the role of smart phones. Maybe it isn’t just teenagers whose brains are getting wrecked?
The overall findings actually aren’t that interesting. The OECD hasn’t repeated some of the analyses that made the first report so fascinating (results were a little too interesting, I guess), so what we get are some fairly broad banalities—scores rise with education levels, but also with parents’ education levels; employment rates and income rise with skills levels; there is broadly a lot of skill mis-match across all economies, and this is a Bad Thing (I am not sure it is anywhere near as bad as OECD assumes, but whatever). What remains interesting, once you read over all the report, are the subtle differences one picks up in the results from one country to another.
So, how does Canada do, you ask? Well, as Figure 1 shows, we are considered to be ahead of the OECD average, which is good so far as it goes. However, we’re not at the top. The head of the class across all measures are Finland, Japan, and Sweden, followed reasonably closely by the Netherlands and Norway. Canada is in a peloton behind that with a group including Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Estonia, the Flemish region of Belgium, and maybe England. This is basically Canada’s sweet spot in everything when it comes to education, skills, and research: good but not great, and it looks worse if you adjust for the amount of money we spend on this stuff.
Figure 1: Key PIAAC scores, Canada vs OECD, 2022-23
Canadian results can also be broken down by province, as in Figure 2, below. Results do not vary much across most of the country. Nova Scotia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec all cluster pretty tightly around the national average. British Columbia and Alberta are significantly above that average, while New Brunswick and Newfoundland are significantly below it. Partly, of course, this has to do with things you’d expect like provincial income, school policies, etc. But remember that this is across entire populations, not school leavers, and so internal immigration plays a role here too. Broadly speaking, New Brunswick and Newfoundland lose a lot of skills to places further west, while British Columbia and Alberta are big recipients of immigration from places further east (international migration tends to reduce average scores: language skills matter and taking the test in a non-native tongue tends to result in lower overall results).
Figure 2: Average PIAAC scores by province, 2022-23
Anyways, none of this is particularly surprising or perhaps even all that interesting. What I think is interesting is how differently this data release was handled from the one ten years ago. When the first PIAAC was released a decade ago, Statistics Canada and the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) published a 110-page analysis of the results (which I analyzed in two posts, one on Indigenous and immigrant populations, and another on Canadian results more broadly) and an additional 300(!)-page report lining up the PIAAC data with data on formal and informal adult learning. It was, all in all, pretty impressive. This time, CMEC published a one-pager which linked to a Statscan page which contains all of three charts and two infographics (fortunately, the OECD itself put out a 10-pager that is significantly better than anything domestic analysis). But I think all of this points to something pretty important, which is this:
Canadian governments no longer care about skills. At least not in the sense that PIAAC (or PISA for that matter) measures them.
What they care about instead are shortages of very particular types of skilled workers, specifically health professions and the construction trades (which together make up about 20% of the workforce). Provincial governments will throw any amount of money at training in these two sets of occupations because they are seen as bottlenecks in a couple of key sectors of the economy. They won’t think about the quality of the training being given or the organization of work in the sector (maybe we wouldn’t need to train as many people if the labour produced by such training was more productive?). God forbid. I mean that would be difficult. Complex. Requiring sustained expert dialogue between multiple stakeholders/partners. No, far easier just to crank out more graduates, by lowering standards if necessary (a truly North Korean strategy).
But actual transversal skills? The kind that make the whole economy (not just a politically sensitive 20%) more productive? I can’t name a single government in Canada that gives a rat’s hairy behind. They used to, twenty or thirty years ago. But then we started eating the future. Now, policy capacity around this kind of thing has atrophied to the point where literally no one cares when a big study like PIAAC comes out.
I don’t know why we bother, to be honest. If provincial governments and their ministries of education in particular (personified in this case by CMEC) can’t be arsed to care about something as basic as the skill level of the population, why spend millions collecting the data? Maybe just admit our profound mediocrity and move on.
Morning everyone. Welcome back. Some statistical wonkery today, with respect to the analysis of government expenditures on postsecondary education.
Many of you will recognize Figures 1 and 2 from earlier blogs or the State of Postsecondary Education 2024. They represent the two most-common ways to look at commitments to postsecondary education: the first in per-student terms, and the second in per-GDP terms.
Figure 1: Provincial Expenditures per FTE Student by Sector, 2022-23
Figure 2: Provincial PSE Expenditures, by Sector, as a Percentage of Provincial GDP, 2022-23
These two approaches have their respective strengths and weaknesses, and not surprisingly they generate slightly different conclusions about how strong each jurisdiction’s efforts are writ to postsecondary education, one focused on the “recipients” of funding (students) and the other focused on the source of the funding (the local economy). Neither is definitive, both are useful.
But there is another way to look at this funding, and that is not to look at how much institutions receive as a proportion of local jurisdictional output, but to look at what percentage of government spending is devoted to educational institutions. Examined over time, this figure tells you the changing status of postsecondary education compared to other policy priorities; examined across provinces, it can tell you which provinces put more emphasis on postsecondary education. Of course, no one tracks this in Canada, because it involves a lot of tedious mucking around in government documents, but what is this blog for if not precisely that? I wasn’t doing anything on my holidays anyways.
So I decided to pair my long-term data series on provincial budgets (the most recent one posted back in April), with a new data series on total provincial spending which I derived simply by looking at consolidated expenditures in each province since 2006 and expressed in these same budgets. Usual disclaimers apply: provincial spending definitions aren’t entirely parallel (or at least they use different words to describe what they are doing) particularly with respect to capital, so inter-provincial comparisons are probably a tiny bit apples-to-oranges even if each province’s data is consistent over time. Take the exact numbers with a grain of salt but I think they will mostly stand up to scrutiny.
Figure 3 shows provincial transfers on postsecondary institutions across all ten provinces as a percentage of total provincial spending. And it’s…well, it’s not good. As recently as 2011-12, provinces spent five percent of their budgets on postsecondary education. Now it’s three and a half percent. Or to put it another way, as a proportion of total spending, it’s down by about thirty percent.
Figure 3: Provincial Spending on PSE as a Percentage of Total Provincial Spending, Canada, 2006-07 to 2024-25
Is this due to particular events in particular provinces? Not really. Let’s just take a look at the four big provinces (which make up 85% of the postsecondary system. The provinces all started in different places (Alberta, famously, spent a heck of a lot more than other provinces back in the day) and the slope of decline is gentler in Quebec than elsewhere, but the basic path of decline and the eventual destination is similar everywhere. Notable by its absence in any of the four provinces are any clear break-lines which coincide with a change in administration—these declines are pretty consistent regardless of whether governments are left, right, or centre. It’s not a partisan thing.
Figure 4: Provincial Spending on PSE as a Percentage of Total Provincial Spending, Selected Provinces, 2006-07 to 2024-25
Figure 5 shows each province’s performance both in 2006-07 and 2024-25. As can clearly be seen, every province saw a decline over the 18-year period. This was not especially driven by one or two provinces: all provinces seem to have come to an identical conclusion that postsecondary institutions are not worth investing in. The size of whatever drop was in most cases inversely proportionate to how high spending was back in the initial period. The biggest drops were in Alberta and Newfoundland, which back in the day were the two highest spenders, riding high as they were on oil revenues. The smallest drop was New Brunswick, which was the weakest performer back in 2006-07. Ontario…is Ontario. But basically, the entire country is converging on the idea that investments in postsecondary need to be in the 2.5%-4.5% range rather than in the 4-7.5% range as they did 20 years ago.
Figure 5: Provincial Spending on PSE as a Percentage of Total Provincial Spending, by Province, 2006-07 vs 2024-25
Now, the obvious conclusion you might draw from this is “hey! Huge declines in public support for public postsecondary education!” But this is not quite correct. Remember: these are ratios we are looking at. Some of the delta will be due to changes in the numerator, some will be due to changes in the denominator. Figure 6 shows changes in both postsecondary spending and total provincial spending. And what’s clear is that the changes we have been examining in Figures 3 and 6 have more to do with the expansion of total spending rather than a decline in PSE spending.
Figure 6: Real Change Provincial Spending on PSE Institutions vs Real Change Total Provincial Spending, Canada, 2006-07 to 2024-25 (2006-07 = 100)
That increase in provincial spending in the last decade—30% over and above inflation—is wild. And deeply inconvenient for anyone who wants to build a narrative around generalized “austerity.” But what is clear here is:
transfers to universities and colleges have trailed provincial spending everywhere and without reference to ideology of the governments in question, and
ii) if transfers had not trailed general spending, they would be roughly $9.5 billion better off than they are today.
And by a simply *amazing* coincidence, $9.5 billion–in real dollars—is almost identical to the increase in income postsecondary institutions have seen in revenue from international students over the same period (it’s about a $9.2 increase from 2007-08 to 2022-23, the last year for which we have useful data—the 2024-25 is likely somewhat higher but we don’t know by how much).
There a number of conclusions one could draw from this, but the ones I draw are:
Governments are spending more. A lot more. They just aren’t spending on PSE. Instead, they are spending it on an ageing population and other things that juice consumption. Eating the future, basically.
The drop in government support for PSE relative to overall spending increases is universal. No government provides any evidence of contrarian thinking. None of them think PSE is worth greater investment.
Changes of government are also almost irrelevant. They may change the “vibe” around postsecondary education, but they don’t change financial facts on the ground.
There is a really basic argument about the value of postsecondary education which somehow, postsecondary institutions are losing with governments and, I think by implication, the public. That, and nothing else, needs to be the focus of institutional efforts on external relations.
Provincial governments are eating the future. But the data above, showing that the trend transcends geography and political ideology suggests that at base, the problem is that the Canadian public does not think postsecondary education is worth investing in. Working out how to reverse this view really needs to be job one for the whole sector.
(Or, to be a bit cuter: the sector needs to do a lot less Government Relations and a lot more Community Relations.)
