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Category: Politics

Why Can’t We Just Means-Test Tuition?

A couple of weeks ago, I had an exchange with a colleague who couldn’t figure out why tuition wasn’t means-tested.  It just makes sense, he said: make the rich kids pay lots of tuition, and make the poor kids pay very little. I argued that it was means-tested.  If you didn’t have means, you’d get a grant, which would reduce tuition (though I allowed that this was done a lot less effectively than it could be, given how poor our

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February 20, 2014 2 Comments

The Canada Apprentice Loan

One of the signature pieces in last week’s budget was the Canada Apprentice Loan (CAL).  Very few details were given out at the time (see p. 70 in the budget, here), but what details did emerge suggest two things to me: first, that the idea went into the budget less-than-fully-baked; and second, that it could turn out to be a fairly significant political mess. The proof of this being less-than-fully-baked is the lack of detail surrounding the idea.  While the

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February 18, 2014 9 Comments

HESA’s 2014 Federal Budget Commentary

Hi all, The team at HESA towers was up late last night putting together – as we do every year – a review of the Federal Government’s Budget measures, as they relate to higher education and training.  Far from being the snooze-fest many had predicted, it turned out there was a whole bunch of crazy stuff in there, from vast but slightly hazy research funds, to largely inexplicable apprenticeship loan programs.  You can read all of our budget coverage, HERE. Still

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February 12, 2014 2 Comments

Cooling the “War on Science” Rhetoric

Today’s budget day.  I think we can be reasonably certain that no matter what comes up on the R&D front, somebody is going to trot out the meme that the Harper government is conducting a “War on Science”.  But this is, at best, a half-truth.  There is an enormous difference between the Harper government’s record of heeding scientific advice and its behaviour towards government scientists, on the one hand, and its record of funding academic science, on the other. Their

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February 11, 2014 1 Comment

China: The Expansion Hangover

The explosive growth of China’s higher education sector wasn’t achieved without incident.  In fact, the expansion has thrown up a number of challenges for institutions and students alike. Let’s start with the institutions.  The so-called 985 universities – that is, the research-intensive schools directly under the control of the education ministry in Beijing – have done remarkably well out of government policies since the 1990s.  Peking and Tsinghua Universities, in particular, have become genuinely global powerhouses in certain fields of research

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February 10, 2014 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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