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Category: Policy

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

Alberta PSE News

It’s been awhile since we’ve taken a policy tour out west, but it’s time I think to take a look at what’s going on in Alberta, where the NDP government is past its midpoint and starting to work towards an election in 2019. One day, someone is going to write a fantastic political book about the Alberta NDP.  This is a party that went from (essentially) nothing to government in the space of a few crazy weeks in 2015.  They

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January 15, 2018 1 Comment

What a National Housing Strategy Tells Us About Higher Education

The big news in Canada last week was the unveiling by the governing Liberals of a “National Housing Strategy”.  Housing is a good policy file to watch for higher education policy types, because housing and higher education share a lot of qualities. This might not seem like an obvious policy analogy, but hear me out.  Shelter, like higher education, is often viewed as a “right”, but it’s one where the base assumption is (in North America, anyway) is that it

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November 29, 2017 1 Comment

Private Returns, Heterogeneous Products, and Insurance Markets

My last blog post on university tuition – which said that higher education has both public and private returns and charges should be arranged commensurate with the latter – seems to have sparked a variety of responses by email and on the blog.  Some of you were trolling, I think, or playing devil’s advocate, anyway. Others had serious objections.  Regardless, the counter-arguments essentially came in two varieties, and I want to take a moment today to answer both. The “But-lower-levels-of-education-have-private-returns-too-so-why-not-charge-for-K-12?”

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November 3, 2017 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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