1/ Hey, hey! The State of Post-secondary Education in Canada, 2018, is here! All the key data on Canadian tertiary education in one place! I'll be posting the key stories which emerge from the data on this thread for the rest of the day. higheredstrategy.com/wp-content/upl…
2/ Maybe the most important trend in Canadian PSE is the growing centrality of international students to Canadian university budgets. Here's the data on intl enrolment, to 2015-16 (trust me, trends still going in same direction today.) 
3/ Or you can look at that international student data in percentages. Similar-looking graph.
4/ Those students are adding a lot of extra $s to institutional budgets. At unis (can't do colleges b/c lack of data - thanks Statscan & colleges!), intl student tuition and fees were over $3 billion in 2015-16, almost 3x what they were in 2006-07.
5/ (Note: all figures in this thread are in inflation-adjusted $2016 unless otherwise)
6/ Those extra billions in fees were really handy to institutions because they almost exactly balanced off the governments cuts of the last decade (more accurately - erosion through inflation of stagnant grants). Result: unis & colleges kept budgets intact despite cuts.
7/ The numbers line up almost exactly: international student fees have backfilled government cuts dollar for dollar thus sparing institutions the kind of budget carnage they had during 1990s. Now ask yourself...what will happen in ON if Ford govt slices 5-10% from grants?
8/ Quick time-out on this thread to acknowledge @andrewjnorton as an inspiration for today's publication: he's been putting out the "Mapping Australian Higher Education" series for yonks. Great stuff. Read them here: grattan.edu.au/home/higher-ed…
9/ OK, now here's the other big impt story from today: every Wed, after Labour day, Statscan releases its tuition numbers and the left starts wailing about "spiralling tuition", "sky-rocketing student debt" etc. Not actually a spiral: avg real increase is 2%/year since 2000.
10/ But need-based student aid has changed a lot over the last couple of decades to keep pace. There's more of it, and it's more grant-based than it used to be. Grants in fact 4x in real $ since 1995-96. (and that's before the big $2016 changes which added 000s of Ms to grants)
11/ Plus there's a ton of other new types of student aid. between 95/96 and 15/16 we also added $859M to CESGs, $1.756B to tax credits, and $1.8B to institutional scholarships. Total: $12.6B. Throw in PSSSP, merit awards, tri-council grad scholarships, you're over $13B in aid.
12/ Total fees collected in Canada: $12.6B, of which about $3.5B is from international students. Total student aid: over $13B , of which $4.6B is loans. Thus we take in about $9B/yr in domestic fees and hand out about $9B/yr in individual subsidies. Net tuition: zero
13/ One result of pouring in all this non-repayable aid? Student debt isn't actually increasing. Values from diff surveys over past decade (NGS and CUSC. latter shown with *) converge around $27,000 among those with debt (and % with debt seems to be decreasing slightly)
14/ PSA: having put all that into one nice easy-to-read chapter in our publication, the next journo/op-ed writer who spouts lazy, inaccurate crap about decreasing affordability/skyrocketing debt is going to get a serious (metaphorical) clip upside the head from me. Fair warning.
15/ Wondering what the heck I am going on about? Don;t want to scroll back to the Opening Tweet? It's about The State of Post-secondary Education in Canada out today from HESA Towers. higheredstrategy.com/the-state-of-p…
