The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Funding and Finances

Free Tuition in Chile

Last fall, Michelle Bachelet was once again elected as President of Chile, on a considerably more radical platform than that which propelled her to the same position eight years earlier.  One of her many campaign promises was to make higher education completely free.  This is a Big Deal.  It’s not like Germany, where tuition was only ever a derisory sum; in Chile, tuition payments are equal to 2% of GDP, a larger percentage than anywhere else in the world, outside

Read More »
October 15, 2014 No Comments

Free Tuition in Germany

A few years ago, Germany’s Supreme court declared that tuition fees were constitutional, thus paving the way for some states to experiment with fees.  Seven of them (containing over half of all students) did so: Baden-Wurttemburg, Bavaria, Hamburg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Saarland.  The fees varied a bit from place to place, but most settled on a modest €500 (Hesse was €1000) – though in some places waiver systems meant that as many as a third of students paid

Read More »
October 14, 2014 1 Comment

Ending the Merit Scholarship Arms Race

Here’s a way the new Ontario Minister of Training Colleges and Universities, Reza Moridi, could do everyone an enormous service, and win political capital at the same time: force institutions to cut back radically on automatic merit-based entrance scholarships. Here’s the background: at some point in the 1990s, Canadian institutions hooked onto the idea of giving out entrance awards as a way of managing enrolment.  It was a nice trick to help lock students in early in the admissions process

Read More »
September 25, 2014 4 Comments

Who’s Relatively Underfunded?

As I said yesterday, there’s a quick way to check claims of relative underfunding in block-grant provinces: take each institution’s enrolment numbers by field of study from Statscan’s Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS), plug those numbers into the Ontario and Quebec funding formulas, and then compare each institutions’ hypothetical share of total provincial weighted student units (WSUs) under those formulas to what we know they actually receive via CAUBO’s annual Financial Information of Universities and Colleges (FIUC) Survey. Simple, right?

Read More »
September 4, 2014 4 Comments

“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

Read More »
September 3, 2014 1 Comment
Load More

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...