How Wealthy Are Canadian Universities?

Bonus: no elections were even mentioned in this post.

Between rising costs, federal and provincial funding cutbacks, dropping immigration quotas, and declining school-aged populations, Canada’s universities are racing headlong into a devastating financial crisis.

Or not. Based on their financial reporting, Canada’s universities are as strong and stable as ever, with massive endowments and eye-watering income streams. In fact, even if their public funding would disappear overnight, many of the largest universities would have enough gas in the tank to keep them on the road for years.

To figure out which of those two narratives best reflects reality, I used two separate AI tools to analyze publicly-available financial documents to create estimates covering most recent asset, revenue, and expense data for the 13 Canadian universities with a total enrollment of at least 30,000 students (full or part time). For my calculations, I used averages of the two datasets.

The data should be treated as tentative because I couldn’t confirm the accuracy of the AI estimates. However I did compare the two estimate sets looking for correlations and found that six of the 11 metrics were highly correlated, three were moderately correlated, and two (“sales and services” revenues and “land holdings”) were only weakly correlated.

We’ll begin with some tasty hors d’oeuvres. Which schools’ budgets have the highest concentration of public funding? Well that’ll depend on your province. Schools in Alberta and French-language schools in Quebec are the most reliant on governments, while Ontario’s are the least.

Institutional endowments are a big deal.¹ They consist of gifts given to universities that are designed to be used as equity in long-term investments. The idea is that the equity itself will never be touched, but the capital gains are to be used to fund programs of one sort or another.

The University of Toronto’s endowments are the country’s richest - apparently topping $3.3 billion. The poorest of the top-thirteen schools is Toronto Metropolitan University, who are forced to scrape by on just $175 million. Here’s how the leaderboard looks when comparing endowment dollars per student (both full and part time).

Who spends the most on their students? I have no idea. But I can tell you who spends the most per student. That, without a doubt, would be UBC. And it’s not even close.

Now let’s get back to the question in the title: just how wealthy are Canadian universities? Well what does wealth even mean?