The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Institutions

Classroom Economics (Part 4)

Yesterday we looked at ways to get the teaching budget down.  Today, we’re going to look at the other half of the cost equation: all that overhead.  And we’re going to look at it by asking the question: how big a cut in overhead would it take to equal the effect of replacing 20% of your credit hours with sessionals (which, as we saw yesterday, reduces overall teaching loads by 17%)? Recall the equation: X = aϒ/(b+c), where “X” is the

Read More »
January 22, 2015 No Comments

Classroom Economics (Part 3)

(If you’re just tuning in today, you may want to catch up on Part 1 and Part 2) Back to our equation: X = aϒ/(b+c), where “X” is the total number of credit hours a professor must teach each year (a credit hour here meaning one student sitting in one course for one term), “ϒ” is average compensation per professor, “a” is the overhead required to support each professor, “b” is the government grant per student credit hour, and “c” is

Read More »
January 21, 2015 9 Comments

Free Community College in Canada?

As Canadians, we have a tendency to pay an excess amount of attention to developments in the US.  For instance, people are already asking whether the Obama free community college model would work in Canada.  But this is actually two questions.  The first is whether or not someone could make community college free; the second question is whether that someone could be the federal government? Let’s take the second question first: could the federal government be the ones to do this in

Read More »
January 15, 2015 2 Comments

That Obama Free Community College Proposal

I was going to start on a series about growth in non-academic staff numbers today, but the news out of Washington late last week was too spectacular, so I’m bumping it.  Did Obama really say he wanted to make community college free? Well, yes he did.  But he might not have meant it the way we all heard it.  And whatever happens, it’s unlikely to occur any time soon. Let’s start with what he actually said (White House fact sheet,

Read More »
January 12, 2015 No Comments

Yet More Reasons Free Tuition is a Bad Idea

The easy case to be made against free tuition is that it benefits students from richer backgrounds.  That’s because they are more numerous in higher education than students from poorer backgrounds and so, on aggregate, would receive more aid.  But that misses a more important point: because of the interaction between student aid and tuition, students from wealthier backgrounds would also receive a bigger benefit on an individual level. Let’s take a really simple example from Ontario.  Take two students, Adele and

Read More »
November 4, 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...