Ontario Post-Secondary Education Funding Policies: Perverse Incentives and Unintended Consequences

Charles Beach () and Frank Milne

No 1424, Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University

Abstract: This paper offers some observations on the funding of post-secondary schools in Ontario and Canada more broadly. Specifically, it notes how limited public funding for domestic students has provided strong incentives for PSE schools to attract full fee-paying international students, whose numbers have risen dramatically in recent years in Canada. The result has been a rising financial exposure of such schools to sudden external funding shocks and an increasing risk to the overall quality and available curriculum of programs delivered to all students. The paper also comments on Ontario plans for differentiation of schools, and raises concerns about Ontario’s planned heavy reliance on performance-based funding rules. We explore unintended consequences of crude application of simplistic performance metrics using a number of examples from recent British and Australian experience.

Keywords: post-secondary education; international students; Ontario university funding incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I22 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://www.econ.queensu.ca/sites/econ.queensu.ca/files/wpaper/qed_wp_1424.pdf First version 2019 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qed:wpaper:1424

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