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Category: Institutions

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

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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,

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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

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November 4, 2014 1 Comment

Cockroaches

One of the most maddening things about higher education journalism is the widespread assumption of fragility. Take the notion of vulnerability to technological disruption.  The most recent example of this is a piece from University World News (which really should know better) entitled “Can Universities Survive the Digital Age?”  It’s an absolutely ridiculous question that could only be posed by someone who knew virtually nothing of the history of universities. Every time there’s a technological innovation, somebody thinks the university

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November 3, 2014 5 Comments

Times Higher Rankings, Weak Methodologies, and the Vastly Overblown “Rise of Asia”

I’m about a month late with this one (apologies), but I did want to mention something about the most recent version of the Times Higher Education (THE) Rankings.  You probably saw it linked to headlines that read, “The Rise of Asia”, or some such thing. As some of you may know, I am inherently suspicious about year-on-year changes in rankings.  Universities are slow-moving creatures.  Quality is built over decades, not months.  If you see huge shifts from one year to

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October 30, 2014 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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