Author: Alex Usher

Cui bono?

Who owns universities?  It seems like a simple question but it’s actually deviously complex. Some universities have actual owners: globally, about two-thirds of higher-education institutions are technically private, through there is some dispute how to count institutions which are not state-owned but accept state money as operating grants (in Canada, this would include McGill).  Most analyses make a distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit institutions, and that is a useful distinction in some respects: for-profits are never particularly reputable, whereas in

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The Twelve Student Aid Programs That Matter

One of the challenges of trying to do large-scale global comparative higher education work is focusing.  It’s a big world out there – and there are so many interesting variations and models that you just want to get your hands on everything.  But at some point, you must choose a few things in order to make sense of the bigger patterns. So it is with student financial assistance.  There are aid programs in a lot of countries, many with some

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New Ways of Looking at Institutional Revenues

Just a quick blog today as things are kind of hopping at HESA Towers this week (literally, in the sense that the floor shakes a bit with the new construction).  It’s about how to measure revenue in Canadian higher education. Long-time readers are used to me publishing data like that in Figure 1, which shows provincial government expenditure per student.  The usual conclusion everyone draws from this graph is “holy cow, Ontario is run by monsters” (to which the answer

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How Big Consulting thinks about Higher Education

A couple of weeks ago, David Kernohan at WonkHE, wrote a wonderfully cutting little piece about a new Ernst & Young report calling for a “fundamental re-think” of higher education, and how it seemed to rely on millenarian scenarios in order to sell what was actually a fairly modest call for institutions to maybe improve their IT capabilities.  It inspired me to think a bit more about how the rest of the big consulting groups – Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst &

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DIY Economic Impact Studies

If there is one thing that drives me spare about Canadian universities’ and colleges’ government relations operations, it’s their obsession with economic impact studies, and their habit of wasting tens of thousands of dollars every couple of years to do new ones.  You all need to stop.  It’s not just because no one believes any of the data (or rather, the people at whom these are aimed fully understand that since no opportunity cost analysis ever accompanies these studies, they

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