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Category: Universities

The Uselessness of Automatic Entrance Scholarships

A couple of weeks ago, HEQCO released The Impact of Scholarships and Bursaries on Persistence and Academic Success in University, in which Martin Dooley, Abigail Payne, and Leslie Robb examined the effects of university merit scholarships in terms of grades, persistence, and degree completion.  The paper’s technical analysis was excellent, but the policy analysis wasn’t as sharp as it could have been. Most scholarships these days can be described as “automatic” awards – if you have an 80% average in high school,

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January 25, 2013 2 Comments

American College Sports

You may have heard something last week about a new report from the Delta Cost Project, in the United States.  Typically, I’m a big fan of the Delta Cost Project, but I think this particular study misses the point. The main line of argumentation against college sports in the US is that only a few big schools actually make money on athletics; on the whole, schools lose money, which could otherwise be spent on academics.  While true, this point could

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January 24, 2013 No Comments

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

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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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