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Category: Government

The New Federal Government

I know this seems a bit late because the election was almost three months ago, but unlike 2015, the victorious Liberals took their sweet time forming a government and it was not until mid-December, after this blog closed for the break, that it issued mandate letters to all its new Minsters.  But with those now completed and made public, we can begin to get a handle on how this minority Liberal government intends to govern with respect to PSE. Let’s

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January 7, 2020 No Comments

Welcome to the 2020s

Hi all.  Hope you all had a restful set of holidays. At the start of a new decade, it is fashionable to look ahead at what will happen in one’s sector.  Personally, I think that life is going to change in ways we can’t imagine over the next ten years, so getting too specific is a fool’s errand.  What I would like to do instead is talk about what the big challenges are going to be. The first big challenge

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January 6, 2020 4 Comments

Final Friday

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),

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December 13, 2019 1 Comment

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (4)

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

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December 5, 2019 2 Comments

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (1)

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

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December 2, 2019 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.

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