CAUBO’s Data Insights series highlights key financial trends in the university sector. The Data Insights provide concise, yet fact-based analysis of some of the sector’s most pressing risks and challenges.
The newest entry in the Data Insights series, Non-Academic Salary Spending Patterns at Canadian Universities, focuses on institutional spending with an emphasis on non-academic salaries and wages. The analysis explores where compensation is incurred—whether in central administration or within faculties—and contextualizes how growing regulatory requirements, enhanced student services, and increased research support have shaped non-academic compensation. The report also examines how institutional size and the degree of administrative centralization influence spending patterns, while highlighting the structural constraints universities face in adapting to fiscal pressures.
The first two entries in the series, initially released in 2021, address the changing patterns in spendable income and general operating expenditures. They have now been updated to reflect the most recent available data (2022-2023). The updated entries in the series are available at the links below:
- Changing Patterns in University Revenues—addresses the ongoing shift in the composition of operating income at Canadian universities and underscores that tuition revenues have become increasingly consequential as government revenues continue to decline as a proportion of funding, focusing on the sector’s increasing reliance on more volatile sources of income such as those stemming from international students.
- Changing Patterns in General Operating Expenditures—examines the concurrent shift that has occurred in expenditures at Canadian universities, highlighting the factors that have driven changes in spending patterns between various expenditure types (including faculty compensation) and across functions.