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Category: Policy

Spousal Income

Over the past decade, successive Canadian governments have tried to give bigger and bigger breaks to parents through the student aid system. Loan eligibility has steadily been widened to richer and richer families by making expected parental contributions less onerous. But for some reason, no recent government has seen fit to change spousal contribution rates. Since the mid-1990s, this rate has been set at 80% of the spouse’s combined net income over a threshold which varies a bit by province

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November 7, 2012 No Comments

Non-solutions in search of a problem

I thought the Globe’s recent Our Time to Lead series was pretty good. The high point, pretty obviously, was Erin Anderssen’s kick-off piece and the low-point, equally obviously, was Don Tapscott’s context-free piece of techno-fetishist weirdness. On the whole, it was a good sign for what seems to be an increase in coverage on educational issues. However, I do feel the Globe slipped a bit with its very final article; namely, a policy prescription for a “national strategy” for students. I

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November 1, 2012 3 Comments

Unbundling

Over the past few years, we’ve heard recurrent calls and/or predictions that higher education will soon be “unbundled”.  What does this term mean, exactly? It’s a metaphor that’s been used in more than one way.  The unbundling allusion is mostly to the music industry which has seen technology allow consumers to unbundle its main product (albums) into smaller discrete chunks (songs), but there are also allusions here to the cable TV industry and to journalism.  Universities, it is argued, provide

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May 25, 2012 No Comments

Learning From Other Policy Areas: Housing

Sometimes, I think we spend too much time trying to learn from policy in other countries and not enough time learning from related policy areas in our own country. Take housing, for instance – probably higher education’s closest relative in policy terms. Choosing a home, like choosing an undergraduate degree, is a major decision with enormous financial implications, but both can be foreseen many years in advance, allowing people to plan for the purchase. Shelter and education are both considered

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May 16, 2012 1 Comment

Two Economies, Two Universities

There’s an interesting debate going on in American policy circles based on arguments Tyler Cowen advanced in his recent book The Great Stagnation, one with enormous relevance for thinking about the future of the university. The argument is that there are two economies in America today. The first (call it “Economy I”) is composed of the sectors dealing in globally traded goods, which are required to be extremely inventive and dynamic because of the pressure of foreign competition. It is

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April 26, 2012 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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