The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Funding and Finances

Student Aid Tax Rates

Anyone who thinks taxation is overly complicated and onerous in this country needs to spend a day or two in the shoes of a student. That’s because our tax system has absolutely nothing on our student aid assessment system. Student aid in Canada is distributed based on something called “assessed need”, which is defined as “assessed costs” minus “assessed resources” (not real costs or real resources, because those are subjective). Essentially, government has to ask students about their resources and

Read More »
November 12, 2012 1 Comment

Korean Lessons

I’m in Seoul this week, studying some aspects of the Republic of Korea’s system of lifelong learning (picture me Gangnam-dancing if you must). But the country’s overall system of higher education is so flat-out amazing, I thought it would be worth a post or two. How amazing is it, you ask? Well, they kick our behinds in terms of access and success – 90% of their high school graduates attend university or “junior college” right after high school and the

Read More »
October 18, 2012 No Comments

Incentives

A lot of policy discussions in higher education really just amount to “why don’t universities and colleges just ‘do the right thing?’” It seems to me that these discussions would be a whole lot better if they were informed by an understanding of how incentives work. For instance, a couple of weeks ago after I was giving a talk on the general intensification of institutions’ overseas recruitment effort, when an audience member asked “why don’t institutions put that kind of

Read More »
October 17, 2012 No Comments

When Should McGill Go Private?

With the election of a PQ government which is unwilling to sanction tuition fee increases and too broke to actually spend any more money on PSE, there’s one debate which is sure to arise soon: when and under what conditions should McGill leave the public sector and go it alone as a private university? In a sense, of course, McGill has always been private. It was not founded by an act of the legislature, but rather as a charitable enterprise

Read More »
October 10, 2012 1 Comment

Straight Thinking about International Education (1)

Over the past summer, we at HESA have been thinking a lot about international enrolment, and speaking to international student recruiters and advisers, and international students themselves. You’ll get to see some of the results of this in the coming months as we publish some of this research, but I wanted to share a couple of thoughts with you all now, while the federal task force report is still fresh in everyone’s minds. My main thought is this: we’re not ready to

Read More »
October 1, 2012 2 Comments

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...