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Category: Universities

Higher Education as a Positional Good

In policy circles, we talk a lot about whether education is a public or a private good (it’s both), and what the implications are for pricing.  But one thing we don’t talk enough about is the extent to which education is a positional good.  And that’s a problem because our decisions on this topic have serious implications for the way we fund higher education. What’s a positional good?  It’s a good that derives part of its value from the fact it’s valuable,

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September 2, 2014 1 Comment

Improving Career Services Offices

Over the last few years, what with the recession and all, there has been increased pressure on post-secondary institutions to ensure that their graduates get jobs.  Though that’s substantially the result of things like curriculum and one’s own personal characteristics, landing a job also depends on being able to get interviews and to do well in them.  That’s where Career Services Offices (CSOs) come in. Today, HESA released a paper that looks at CSOs and their activities.  The study explores

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August 11, 2014 1 Comment

University of Saskatchewan Detritus

We all remember this spring’s controversy at the University of Saskatchewan over the firing of Robert Buckingham, which resulted in the resignation of the University’s Provost, Brett Fairbairn, and the firing of the President, Ilene Busch-Vishniac.  Despite all the coverage, a number of key questions were never answered, like “how could anyone possibly think firing a tenured professor was a good idea?”  And, “who’s idea was it to fire him anyway – the Provost’s or the President’s?” We now have more

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July 21, 2014 4 Comments

How to Measure Teaching Quality

One of the main struggles with measuring performance in higher education – whether of departments, faculties, or institutions – is how to measure the quality of teaching. Teaching does not go entirely unmeasured in higher education.  Individual courses are rated by students through course evaluation surveys, which occur at the end of each semester.  The results of these evaluations do have some bearing on hiring, pay, and promotion (though how much bearing varies significantly from place to place), but these data

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July 7, 2014 10 Comments

The Effects of Tuition Fees (Part 2)

As I mentioned last week, a major paper I’ve been working on for over a year with colleagues from DZHW on the subject of the effects of fees was published last Monday by the EC (available here).  In my last post, I talked about how fees affected institutions – today, I want to talk about how they affect students. In our report, we looked at case studies over 15 years (1995-2010) from nine countries – Austria, Canada, England, Finland, Germany,

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June 30, 2014 1 Comment

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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