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Category: Universities

The Beagles Have Landed

How do you run a business when profit is meaningless? This is a key question confronting every university administration. Our PSE institutes are businesses – complex organizations which require enormous amounts of money, from diverse sources, in order to succeed. For many reasons, it is a blessing that they are not oriented towards profit. But without a clear bottom line, how do you actually know when to spend, and when not to spend? What replaces the discipline of the market,

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December 17, 2012 1 Comment

Christmas Books

Holiday time means that you’re probably looking for gifts.  If you’re in the market for books related to higher education, I’ve got two recommendations for you. The first is, The University: An Illustrated History.   It’s a coffee-table book, too unwieldy even for reading in bed, let alone on an airplane.  But who cares?  It’s as good a single-volume history of higher learning as has ever been written; it’s admirably global in scope, and it does a very nice job of balancing the institution’s

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December 14, 2012 No Comments

The Presidential Merry-Go-Round

It was noted recently that there are some big presidential vacancies looming, most notably at Toronto, McGill, Victoria, and Dalhousie.  So who’s going to get these plum jobs? At Dalhousie, of course, we already know the answer: It’s Richard Florizone – formerly the VP Finance and Administration at the University of Saskatchewan, who also had stints at the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank), Bombardier, and the Boston Consulting Group. This wasn’t Florizone’s first attempt at becoming a

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December 13, 2012 1 Comment

Manageable Debt, Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at the principles underlying the discussion on manageable student debt; today we examine how Canadian governments try to help students manage debt, and whether or not their efforts are as efficient as they could be. Manageable debt loads are a function of three things: total debt, interest rates, and student income.  The last of these three is only vaguely susceptible to government control, but governments can control program interest rates and total debt loads through direct subsidies. 

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December 11, 2012 No Comments

Manageable Debt

One of the big questions in student loans these days concerns “manageable debt”.  How much debt is manageable, exactly?  And how do we best help borrowers whose debt is unmanageable? As nearly everyone agrees, manageable debt is a flexible concept. For someone with no income, pretty much any amount of debt is unmanageable.  As income rises, however, an increasing amount of debt can be serviced.   Interest rates and repayment terms matter too, of course;  any established debt-to-income ratio is a

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December 10, 2012 No Comments

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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