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Category: Institutions

The Symbolism of Executive Salaries

“Eliminating waste” is a favourite target of politicians who need money for projects, but who don’t want to tell citizens how they plan to pay for those projects.  Build an $8 billion subway with no new taxes?  “Get rid of administrative waste,” says Rob Ford.   Cut taxes, reduce the deficit, and protect military spending, social security, and medicare, at the same time? “Attack waste and administrative costs”, say House Republicans. Bien pensants tend to decry this kind of talk as buffoonish

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January 22, 2013 1 Comment

The Effect of Tripling Tuition Fees: UK Latest

As most of you know, UK tuition fees more or less tripled this past year. The initial applicant/enrolment data from a couple of months ago (which I covered, here) indicated that applications fell by about 8%, but also that the drop came almost entirely from older students (among traditional-aged students, the drop was just 1%).  Worrying, but not apocalyptic. Last week, two new interesting pieces of data were released.  The first was application data by race; though Black and Asian

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January 21, 2013 2 Comments

What Goes Up May Come Down

About six years ago now, when policymakers in Canada started to get excited about international education, many hoped that foreigners might be able to subsidize our expensive system of higher education.  I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it, but the thinking was: if the Australians could manage it, presumably so could we. To date, our results have been pretty good.  International enrolments keep rising. The money keeps on flowing, offsetting the weakness in government funding.  What

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January 18, 2013 No Comments

Why Don’t we Have More Private Higher Education?

Here’s a puzzle:  In many provinces, the law allows for the establishment of new, private, degree-granting institutions.  So why don’t they do it? Why don’t disaffected lawyers set up a cut-price law school in central Toronto to compete against the expensive products offered by U of T and Osgoode?   Why doesn’t a brand-name private secondary institution, like the Bishop Strachan School, create its own liberal arts college, a la Bryn Mawr or Wellesley? In Canada, private higher education is often thought

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January 16, 2013 1 Comment

Those “Lost Generation” Stories

I see Maclean’s is cashing in on the zeitgeist with yet another story about a “lost generation“.  These stories always cover the same arc: Find a young, bright, hardworking, recent graduate whose career, for one reason or another, hasn’t hit lift off; blame this situation on the recession, even though that link can’t really be proven; provide some cod-economic arguments as to why this state of affairs is permanent; repeat. But we should know it’s not true, because we’ve seen

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January 15, 2013 1 Comment

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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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