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Author: Alex Usher

Two Rankings Stories You May Have Missed

Today I want to discuss two interesting developments in rankings, one purely American and the other intriguingly transatlantic. The first is a new set of rankings published by Third Way, a vaguely centre-left Foundation based in Washington DC under the direction of Michael Itzkowitz, an Obama administration appointee who directed the creation of the College Scorecard. Suffice to say Itzkowitz has spent a long time thinking about how to use data to compare colleges’ efforts with respect to public policy

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February 2, 2022 No Comments

Community College Revenues, 2019-20

I haven’t looked at community college finances recently and Statistics Canada just released the most recent FINCOL survey data, so it’s good time to return to the subject.   I’ll stay focussed on the revenue side rather than the expenditures side, because frankly it is a lot more interesting (the expenditure side does not change much year to year and if you really want to examine that, take a look at Chapter 3 of The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada,

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February 1, 2022 No Comments

The South Korean Student Aid Miracle

Last week, we did a piece on Canadian student financial assistance over the years.  Today, I want to jump across the Pacific to South Korea, because that country’s student aid system undergone some incredible policy shifts over the past 15 years. I truly think South Korean student aid policy might be one of the biggest stories in higher education finance anywhere in the world in the past decade, and it has, hitherto gone completely unnoticed by most in the rest

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January 31, 2022 No Comments

University Strategy Safari

I recently had the pleasure of reading the book Strategy Safari by Henry Mintzberg, Bruch Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel.  It’s both an interesting overview of the history of strategic planning and a taxonomy of strategic planning styles.  Of course, I read it with a view to thinking about how planning works in universities and colleges and found it says some interesting things about how universities and colleges think about planning and where there is room for improvement. Strategy is not

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January 27, 2022 1 Comment

A Long-Term View of Student Financial Aid in Canada

Over Xmas, someone asked me on Twitter whether student loans were replacing direct government support as a main source of public assistance.  I answered, no, direct government support either from the feds (mainly through research and infrastructure) or the provinces (operating grants), are worth about five times more that the annual value of student loans.  To wit, Figure 1. Figure 1: Annual Student Loan Disbursements vs. Total Government Transfers to Post-Secondary Institutions, Canada, 1989-90 to 2019-20, in constant $2019 Millions

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January 26, 2022 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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