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Category: Universities

UK Tuition Hikes Revisited

To recap: in 2012, average English tuition fees rose by 158% to roughly £8500, with no corresponding increase in grants.  As we’ve seen previously, this resulted in a fall in English applications of about 8%.  The effect was not evenly distributed among all groups: among 18 year-olds, the drop was 1-2% (depending on what base you use), whilst among applicants over 19, the decrease was 15-20%. But of course, it’s never best to rely on one year of data, especially

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January 31, 2013 1 Comment

Rough Times at ST. FX

I’ve been saying for awhile now that falling government revenue and rising faculty salary expectations have made a really knock-down drag-em-out faculty strike somewhere in Canada – the kind that knocks out an entire semester – almost inevitable.  The one that started Monday at Nova Scotia’s St. Francis Xavier University may not last that long, but boy does it look ugly. Basically, the dispute appears to be as follows: Management is offering somewhere between a 6 and 7% salary increase

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January 30, 2013 No Comments

The Monash-Warwick Alliance

About fifteen months ago, I wrote that the next big thing in cross-border higher education was going to be an actual merger of two institutions, in different countries.  Now, we have a real live experiment to watch, thanks to the Monash-Warwick Alliance. This didn’t get a lot of press when it was announced (I certainly missed it), but it’s a reasonably big deal nonetheless.  In a nutshell, these two large, young  universities (Monash dates from 1958, Warwick from 1964), with

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January 28, 2013 2 Comments

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
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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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