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Category: Access

Measuring Social Mobility in Higher Education

It is a universally acknowledged truth that while nearly every higher education policy maker in the world is required to discuss The Imperative of Accessibility, almost no one defines or measures it.  Because God forbid access policies, especially Canadian policies, be informed by evidence. It’s not like it’s impossible to do.  In the UK, the University and College Application Service simply analyses the postal codes of applicants and students and use that to track changes over time.  Are student entry rates

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November 28, 2018 1 Comment

Harvard on Trial

If you’re at all interested in American higher education, you’ll no doubt have been paying some attention these last couple of weeks to the Harvard Admissions Trial.  On the off chance you haven’t, here’s a quick re-cap: The basics of the case were stated back here by Ron Unz about five years ago: Asian-Americans (meaning mainly Chinese and Korean) get much higher SAT scores (and academic results generally) than other ethnic groups in the United States, yet their share of enrolments at places

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November 5, 2018 No Comments

Targeted Free Tuition: A Global Analysis

Good morning, all. Today, HESA is publishing (jointly, with the Higher Education Policy Institute in London, England) a paper entitled, Targeted Free Tuition: A Global Analysis. This paper is the product of months of surveying an emerging trend in government-financed student aid and what is arguably the most important new idea in higher education financing currently floating around the world. We posit that Targeted Free Tuition (TFT) might be the most progressive student aid policy, simultaneously eliminating tuition-based financial barriers

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September 20, 2018 4 Comments

Affordability and Independence

There are two constructs that make it extremely difficult to talk sensibly about who should pay for higher education.  The first is “affordability” and the second is “independence”, in the sense of students’ independence from the rest of their family.  It’s worth exploring these concepts in detail to see how they complicate analysis Let’s start with affordability, a term which unfortunately has become equated with “accessibility”, which it clearly is not.  Simply put, “affordable” is something you can pay for. 

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September 14, 2018 No Comments

Canada’s Affordability Success Story

Canadians are regularly bombarded with stories about “rising tuition” and “ever-mounting student debt”, the implication always being that the middle-class is being priced out of higher education, access to education is being threatened, etc.  If these stories were true, it would indeed be worrying.  The problem is, they are mostly nonsense and fuelled by ignorance of just how much Canada’s system of student assistance has grown and changed over the past couple of decades. As figure 1 shows, tuition has

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August 29, 2018 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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