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Category: Policy

Human Capital Theory

My work exists at the junction of a few different fields – management, public administration, sociology and economics (which is kind of funny because my degree is in none of those things) – all of which have their own specialized jargon.  One of more jargon-y terms that I know I use a lot is “human capital”, a term which often seems to be misconstrued.  So, I thought I would give an explanation a shot. The OECD definition of human capital,

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May 9, 2018 No Comments

Five Approaches to Subsidizing Students

Specialists sometimes like to talk as if post-secondary funding is some kind of arcane science.  But if you cut to the chase, it’s actually pretty simple.  You can tinker around the edges, and you can use different techniques to fund different parts of the system, but fundamentally there are only these five approaches: Subsidize nothing.  Some education is private and does not attract any subsidy.  In fact, in large swathes of Asia, Africa and Latin America (not to mention about

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April 12, 2018 1 Comment

The Canadian IT Sector: From Self-Hype to Self-Pity

The Canadian tech sector has two modes: self-hype and self-pity.  Neither is very pretty. You may recently have seen articles floating around the internet talking about how great Canada is as a tech destination, how Canada is “winning”/ can “win” the AI race (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean – the verb “to win” takes on vast new meanings in these articles).  There’s been one every two weeks or so, often from big American magazines, for the last

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March 27, 2018 No Comments

Debt-Free Policies

There’s a new policy fashion in student aid and it’s called “debt-free PSE” (or debt-free college, depending on which side of the border you reside).  But what does it mean? Some might think of debt-free PSE as being similar to tuition-free PSE, but in fact they are quite different in practice for two reasons.  The first difference is that under debt-free PSE, the level of tuition can be anything you please: the only thing that is constant is that all

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March 26, 2018 No Comments

Science Federalism

A couple of months ago, I read a rather interesting book called National Innovation Systems and the Academic Enterprise, which is a collection of essays edited by David Dill and Frans van Vught.  It’s a collection of essays about national – and in the case of the US, subnational – innovation policies, and while the quality of the national essays is a bit uneven (the Canadian one was marked mainly by overuse of the word “neoliberalism” and excessive off-point moaning about

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February 14, 2018 2 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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