Okay folks, time for me to sign off for the year. Two housekeeping notes. First, blog service will resume bright and early on January 6th. Second, this will be my last-ever Friday blog. Many of you have over the years asked how I manage to put out this blog every day. The answer is that it is getting difficult for me to balance this with the growth of our business (it has been quite a good year at HESA Towers),
If you’re joining late, we’re talking about the policy decisions that need to be made when creating a student aid system. Read up on student loan origination, student loan repayment parameters and the loans/grants balance. So now we’ve got all the big pieces in place – where the money comes from, how much is going to be loan vs. grant, and how loans are going to be recuperated. Now we get to the really fiddly bits: how to ration the aid (warning: this is a stupidly
Over the years, I have concluded that one of the reasons policy debate can be so stifling is we’re usually debating options within existing policy parameters: that is, “fixes” to existing policy. It’s pretty rare that anyone talks about “greenfield” policies in areas where no policy ever existed. This is kind of a shame, because it means people don’t really understand the process of trade-offs that go into original policy-making. So, just for fun, I am going to spend this week talking about
With things in Ontario starting to calm down, Alberta is the next frontier in Canadian PSE changes. The October budget asked institutions for some pretty significant mid-year adjustments, and if the already-published departmental business plan is anything to go by, it looks as though institutions are going to have to absorb several hundred million dollars more in cutbacks over the next couple of years. How Alberta institutions react to this will be instructive, because they’ll be experiencing in fast-forward what
Last Thursday, the Ontario Superior Court struck down the Ford Government’s “Student Choice Initiative”, a program of voluntary student-unionism (VSU) it imposed last January (see here for a refresher). The court decision is here. It’s a full defeat for the provincial government, the policy is declared void, but it’s unclear if and how student organizations will be compensated for lost revenue from the fall term. A lot of people are arguing this is a victory for student unions and for the cause of
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.
