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Category: Policy

Too Big to Fail?

Here’s a serious question: are universities too big to fail?  And if so, what are the consequences of that? If we had a fully public system, with tight government oversight on budgets, and no deficit spending – sort of like what much of continental Europe has – this wouldn’t be an issue.  By definition, public institutions couldn’t fail (though presumably a government would be free to close an institution should it wish to do so).   But the existence of institutional

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October 2, 2014 1 Comment

Higher Education as a Positional Good

In policy circles, we talk a lot about whether education is a public or a private good (it’s both), and what the implications are for pricing.  But one thing we don’t talk enough about is the extent to which education is a positional good.  And that’s a problem because our decisions on this topic have serious implications for the way we fund higher education. What’s a positional good?  It’s a good that derives part of its value from the fact it’s valuable,

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September 2, 2014 1 Comment

Predicting the Effects of Australian Fee De-regulation

If the Australian government’s plan on fee-deregulation comes to pass, what follows will be one of the greatest experiments ever in higher education.  Institutions will have the right to set fees exactly as they want, which begs two questions: what will they do with that power, and what will the effects be? Let’s start with the first question.  When institutions in England were given the freedom to set tuition fees up to a maximum of £9,000, nearly all of them immediately

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August 29, 2014 2 Comments

Credit-Transfer, Korean Style

There are not many genuinely unique ideas in higher education.  Today, we at HESA are releasing a paper about one of them: Korea’s Academic Credit Bank System (ACBS), available here. Korea has long had a problem with credit transfer.  Its higher education institutions are fairly rigid in terms of admissions, and few like accepting transfer students.  Another big problem is that Korean males have to do two years (roughly – it depends on the service) of universal military service, and

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August 18, 2014 1 Comment

Paul Cappon, Again

You may have noticed that Paul Cappon – former President of the Canadian Council of Learning – had a paper out last week about how what the country really needs is more federal leadership in education.  It is desperately thin. Cappon starts by dubiously claiming that Canada is in some sort of education crisis.  Canada’s position as a world-leader in PSE attainment is waved away thusly: “this assertion holds little practical value when the competencies of those participants are at

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July 14, 2014 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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