Public Education Is Funded: Financial Analysis

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How Public Education is Funded Public funding for education comes either directly from the provincial or territorial government through a mix of provincial transfers and local taxes collected by the local government through property taxes .The provincial and territorial taxes are revised yearly to provide the grant structure that sets the level of funding for each school board based on factors, such as the number of students, special needs, and location. In 1977, the provincial government of Ontario developed a funding formula for education in order to make education more equitable across the province, and since then there have adjustments made to the formula but the basic structure of the formula remains the same. Furthermore, the school …show more content…

This impacts the price of education because more money is needed to sustain the schools and the students. In the years 2012 to 2014, the cost of education, for the whole country, rose from $275.6 billion, to $276.8 billion. This increase in expenditures corresponds to the rate of inflation between those years, a 4.04 per cent increase. In Ontario alone, education for public schools rose nearly 50 per cent between the years of 2003 ($8.3 billion) to 2012 ($25 billion), even though there was a 4.6 decline in student enrollment in the same period of time. As a result, the per-student spending increased by 57.3 per cent in the timeframe. The main sources to the increase in spending are pension costs, renovations and building new facilities. According to Deani Van Pelt and Ben Eisen on Frasier Institute, pension costs in Ontario rose 103.8 per cent in the same timeframe, rising from $685 million to $1.4 billion in annual spending. Renovations and the building of new facilities nearly doubled from $1.4 billion annually to $2.4 …show more content…

Furthermore, a higher level of education correlates to lower levels of unemployment. This is evident through the drop in unemployment when education increases, as the 2013 chart from profitofeducation.org indicates unemployment drops from 14.1% to 9.4% due to the ability to obtain a high school diploma. Furthermore, a study by statistic Canada shows that wage gap between high-school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders has been narrowing over the last decade (between 2000-to-2002 and the 2010-to-2012 period). The hourly wages of full time employed high school graduates between the ages of 20 to 34 increased significantly, whereas the wages of bachelor degree holders barely changed. In addition to this, a study by the European Commission found that if the national education level is increased by a single year, productivity increases by 6.2 percent, and a further 3.1 percent in the long run. Moreover, an educated workforce allows for well-trained workers that are more productive, thus allowing them to earn more money than workers with poorer training. By having a skilled workforce it allows the economy to focus on specific industries in which skilled professionals are readily trained. Additionally, the skilled workers are more likely to be hired by employers

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