The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Policy

Three Rules for Politicos

So I see that the Government of Ontario has announced what is possibly the most boutique student aid program of all time.  If students volunteer at the 2014-15 PanAm Games, they will be exempted from the pre-study period contribution (a contribution from the money you earn up to 16 weeks prior to the start of your studies) for 2015-16, and will be get a 12-month grace period on their loans (instead of 6-month) before needing to start repayment. <puts computer

Read More »
November 10, 2014 No Comments

Yet More Reasons Free Tuition is a Bad Idea

The easy case to be made against free tuition is that it benefits students from richer backgrounds.  That’s because they are more numerous in higher education than students from poorer backgrounds and so, on aggregate, would receive more aid.  But that misses a more important point: because of the interaction between student aid and tuition, students from wealthier backgrounds would also receive a bigger benefit on an individual level. Let’s take a really simple example from Ontario.  Take two students, Adele and

Read More »
November 4, 2014 1 Comment

Scenario Planning for Ontario and Quebec

Yesterday, we looked at data from 2004 to 2012 to examine income and expenditure trends for Canadian universities, and found that salary and operating budgets were both moving up at a pace of around 4.4% per year in real dollars.  Today, I want to do a bit of scenario planning for the country’s two largest provinces using the same technique of focussing just on operating grants, tuition, and salaries.  Ontario Ontario sits in between two divergent trends – real public

Read More »
October 22, 2014 2 Comments

Free Tuition in Chile

Last fall, Michelle Bachelet was once again elected as President of Chile, on a considerably more radical platform than that which propelled her to the same position eight years earlier.  One of her many campaign promises was to make higher education completely free.  This is a Big Deal.  It’s not like Germany, where tuition was only ever a derisory sum; in Chile, tuition payments are equal to 2% of GDP, a larger percentage than anywhere else in the world, outside

Read More »
October 15, 2014 No Comments

Remembering the Axworthy Green Paper

It was 20 years ago today that then-Human Resources Minister Lloyd Axworthy presented the findings from his long-awaited “Green Paper” on social security to the House of Commons (the paper itself was released the day before, on October 5, 1994).  The back-drop:  Lucien Bouchard was leader of the opposition, Jacques Parizeau was the new Premier of Quebec, and we were on track for a referendum the following year.  Unemployment was over 10 percent; for youth, it was 20 percent.  Our

Read More »
October 6, 2014 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...