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Category: Funding and Finances

“Relative” Underfunding

Institutions always claim to be underfunded.  Seriously, I’ve been at universities in maybe 25 countries – including Saudi Arabia and the Emirates – and I have yet to find an institution that thought it was overfunded.  The reason for this is simple: there’s always just a little bit more quality around the bend, if only you could buy it (the university down the street has a space-shuttle simulator? We need an actual space shuttle to stay competitive!).  So it’s easy to

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September 3, 2014 1 Comment

Predicting the Effects of Australian Fee De-regulation

If the Australian government’s plan on fee-deregulation comes to pass, what follows will be one of the greatest experiments ever in higher education.  Institutions will have the right to set fees exactly as they want, which begs two questions: what will they do with that power, and what will the effects be? Let’s start with the first question.  When institutions in England were given the freedom to set tuition fees up to a maximum of £9,000, nearly all of them immediately

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August 29, 2014 2 Comments

The Australian Experiment (Part 1)

I spent a good part of this month in Australia, talking to people about the radical program introduced in the May budget.  The basics of the system are as follows: A recently-introduced plan of uncapped places, with the government funding as many students as institutions wish to admit, was maintained; however, the average amount of the per-student subsidy will drop by 20%; Tuition fees will be fully de-regulated.  Institutions will be able to charge what they like, subject to the

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August 28, 2014 1 Comment

The Effects of Tuition Fees (Part 2)

As I mentioned last week, a major paper I’ve been working on for over a year with colleagues from DZHW on the subject of the effects of fees was published last Monday by the EC (available here).  In my last post, I talked about how fees affected institutions – today, I want to talk about how they affect students. In our report, we looked at case studies over 15 years (1995-2010) from nine countries – Austria, Canada, England, Finland, Germany,

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June 30, 2014 1 Comment

Crazy Managerial Imperatives Around International Students

One of the weirdest – and I mean totally bat-guano-crazy – things in Canadian higher education is the way recruitment of international students is managed.  Although the image of international student recruitment is often seen simply as a money-spinner for institutions, the fact of the matter is that most institutions aren’t coming close to maximizing revenue from this source.  And that’s not because of any high-minded motives of institutions turning away students they don’t think are suitable for their university

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June 10, 2014 1 Comment

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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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