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Category: Students

Good and Bad Arguments Against Education Tax Credits

One of the things that has become clear to me in much of the commentary about the Net Zero Tuition material last week was that a surprising number of people really don’t understand how tax credits work, or what their distributive impact is.  Worth a review, then. Bad Argument: Poor students don’t benefit from tax credits.  It is quite true that students whose income is not high enough to be taxable cannot use the credits themselves in the current tax year

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April 30, 2014 1 Comment

The Changing Face of Student Protest

You may have missed this story, what with disappearing airliners, annexations in Crimea, and whatnot, but there has been a major and quite unique student uprising going on in Taipei over the past month. The “Sunflower Student Movement” was born in mid-March when the Kuomintang government decided to try to ram a new trade treaty with China through the legislature, without permitting a clause-by-clause review or substantive public hearings.  Since the KMT are known to favour (eventual) reunification with China,

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April 17, 2014 No Comments

A Dreadful Book About Higher Education

If, for some reason, you feel a need to read the literary equivalent of sticking knitting needles in your eyes, have I got a book for you:  Henry Giroux’s, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education.  The whole book is a mixture of baseless assertions, generalizations from anecdotes, and non-existent fact-checking, an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. If you’re going to have an entire book about neoliberalism, it helps to actually define the term.  What is this thing that’s at war with

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March 20, 2014 6 Comments

Students Always Get Hurt

There’s a strike on at UNB.  I won’t get into the ins and outs of it because both sides have kept bargaining positions pretty close to their chests, and so it’s hard to say if one side or the other is being unreasonable.  The administration, presumably, will want to make sure that a wage settlement doesn’t entirely eat up all new revenue (which, as I showed back here, might well be the case).  Staff will presumably want wage increases similar

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January 17, 2014 2 Comments

Student/Faculty Ratios Across Fields of Study

Here’s an intriguing question: what do student/faculty ratios look like across the academy?  No one ever publishes this number.  What you tend to get out of the Statscan data (with a little help from the excellent folks who put out the CAUT Almanac) is a graph of overall student/faculty ratios, such as the one below in Figure 1, which shows that across all institutions and all fields, there has been an increase of about 20% in the faculty/student ratio over the

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January 14, 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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