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Category: Colleges and Polytechnics

The Effects of Tuition Fees (Part 1)

For the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been working on a project with colleagues Dominic Orr and Johannes Wespel of the Deutsche Zentrum für Hochschul- und Wissenschaftsforschung (DZHW) for the European Commission, looking at the effects of changes in tuition fees and fee policies on institutions and students.  The Commission published the results on Friday, and I want to tell you a little bit about them – this week I’ll be telling you about the effects on institutions, and next week I’ll summarize

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June 23, 2014 4 Comments

Canadian Students Pay Net Zero Tuition

Yesterday, we noted that Canada hands out over $10 billion to its students each year.  Of that, $6.6. billion goes to students in the form of tax credits or grants; another $700 million is spent on savings incentives of various sorts.  All told,  over 70% of the $10 billion is non-repayable. How does that compare to what students spend on tuition?  Well, this isn’t entirely straightforward.  We know from CAUBO/Statscan statistics that in 2011-12, universities collected $7.37B in fees from students.  What

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April 22, 2014 8 Comments

Rewind on Those Foley/Green Numbers

So, you may remember that last week I published this neat little graph from the National Graduates Survey, showing university and graduate incomes across all ten provinces, three years after graduation.  Note that although the numbers vary by province, the university number is always higher than the college number. Median Earnings of College and Bachelor’s Graduates Three Years After Graduation, in 2013               The super-keen among you may also remember something I wrote three

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April 16, 2014 No Comments

Superior Strategy

You may recall that, a few weeks ago, I was somewhat harsh about Western’s new strategic plan for being a kind of Stepford-link strategy: generic, and utterly lacking in anything that suggested Western had its own strengths and personality.  If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen me make some similar remarks about Waterloo’s strategic plan.  Waterloo is one of the country’s few universities that genuinely has a unique value proposition, and deep strengths on which to build –

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October 7, 2013 No Comments

What The Heck Did You THINK Was Going to Happen?

I’m a bit bewildered by some of the recent commentary about declining returns to education, most notably last week’s paper from CIBC on the subject.  While the actual report was not nearly as stupid as the ream of press coverage that followed it, it still had a few howlers, and definitely lacked critical thinking. First, the howlers.  1) The returns to Bachelor’s degrees are not declining; they are, in fact, growing at a slightly slower rate than at other levels of education,

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September 3, 2013 2 Comments

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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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