Many will have caught Alex Usher’s post on HESA dealing with university finances in Canada during the pandemic year which paints a surprisingly different picture of university finances than what one might expect. Of the 34 universities with data available for the 2020-21 fiscal year, 30 of them posted surpluses and some of them were quite staggering. For example, a 726 million-dollar surplus at University of Toronto (a $441 million surplus the year previous) or Queen’s with $144 million surplus (year previous was $35.7 million). This seems quite at odds with the sky is falling scenarios that propagated the early part of the pandemic as universities argued that they were going to lose money. So how did this happen?
According to Usher: “Well, apart from the University of Saskatchewan (where the turnaround was mostly due to a quite amazing uptick in the investment portfolio), the formula was pretty simple. Overall, university revenues rose slightly – about 2.6% in nominal terms – while expenditures stayed unchanged. Essentially, the savings from keeping campuses closed offset the usual 2-3% growth in salary costs.” Indeed, as he concludes: “universities did not in fact lose money during the pandemic. They cut their budgets in anticipation of a fall in revenue and then the fall never came. They will be in good shape to deal with the next year or two when, I suspect, we will see a bit more labour militancy that we’ve seen for awhile.”
So of course, the interesting question is how did Lakehead University do? Well, Lakehead has also done surprisingly well according to its 2020-2021 financial statement that was recently released. From 2020 to 2021, revenues did fall slightly from $200.2 million to $198.3 million – a drop of just under one percent. However, total expenses fell even faster going from $198.7 million in 2020 to $187.6 million in 2021 – a drop of 5.5 percent. As a result, there was an operating surplus of $10.691 million in 2021 which was up from a surplus of $$1.542 million in 2020. And this was before the unrealized gains from an interest rate swap are factored in which brings the total surplus to $14.456 million. It turns out Lakehead, like Saskatchewan, did very well on its investment portfolio seeing an increase in investment income from $3.4 million the year before to $20.055 million – a staggering 488 percent. One wonders why their management of their own investment portfolio does not translate into better management of the university pension plan – one of the worst university pensions in the country in terms of the benefits provided to retirees but I digress.
On the revenue side, aside from investment returns it turns out everything else was down. Government general grant revenue was down 3 percent while student fees were down 1.5 percent. There was a slight fall in enrollment which accounts for this as total enrollment (full-time and part-time students) went from 8505 to 8365 – a decline of 1.6 percent. However, the good news is that 2021-22 is expected to see a rebound with total enrollment currently estimated at about 8668 – an increase of about 3.6 percent. So, one can expect both tuition and grant revenue to rebound this year.
As for expenses, well salaries and benefits were down -0.3 percent, supplies for operations were -25 percent, the costs of operating assorted sales and services were -61 percent, building and equipment maintenance costs were -19 percent and travel was down a remarkable 93 percent – from $4.1 million the year before to $302 thousand during the pandemic year. This may prove to be one of the more important cost savings as the constant shuttling of administrators and staff from Thunder Bay to Orillia and Toronto obviously can be replaced by Zoom technology. As for salaries and benefits, the university took full advantage of the provincial restraint salary guidelines thereby keeping compensation cost growth low and that will continue this year given the contract that was negotiated. And, it turns out that having all the faculty and staff work from home saved several million dollars in operations and maintenance as costs like utilities were shifted onto employee home budgets.
So, in the end the sky did not fall and when the last year is placed in long-term context, Lakehead’s finances are indeed looking quite robust. Figure 1 plots revenues, expenditures, and deficits since 2000 and they show growing revenues and expenditures and deficits in only 5 of the last 21 years. The last five years have seen a string of operating surpluses of which 2020-21 is the largest. Indeed, Lakehead has seen an accumulated surplus since 2020 of $83 million dollars. Where has that money gone? Likely into the university’s long-term investment portfolio which according to the financial statement sits at about $144 million dollars and of course this year earned a whopping $20 million dollar return. It certainly has not gone into paying down the debt which as Figure 2 shows went up $8.038 million in 2020-21 from th year previous to reach $106.6 billion. This was to finance the athletic facility expansion.
When it comes to long-term major revenue performance as depicted in Figure 3, government grants in total dollars have been flat at about $65 million annually since 2010 and as a share of total revenue have declined from a peak of 43 percent in 2009 to reach 32 percent at present. As for student fees (tuition), it has grown dramatically since 2010 –nearly doubling from about $43 million in 2010 to reach $84 million at present. Figure 4 shows that enrollment growth is only partially responsible for this because despite the long-term upward trend, total enrollment is about where it was a decade ago and has been recovering after a decline. What has changed is the composition of the students as there has been a larger share of international; students who also pay much higher tuition.
So, there you have it. Lakehead’s finances during the pandemic were quite good and come on top of a long-term stable and improving financial situation marked by rising revenues, enrollment growth and an expanding university investment portfolio. This echoes the comments made by the university during the situation at Laurentian that Lakehead is "very financially sound". That is good to know. If Alex Usher is right, Lakehead like the rest of the university sector will see increasing calls from its faculty and staff for a return on their investment of time and personal resources into the operations and success of the university.