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Category: Tuition

A New (ish) Argument About Debt and Tuition

As I am starting to sketch out the bones of my next book, (semi-serious working title: How Tuition Fees Will Save the World), I am collecting arguments about the nature and desirability of private contributions to higher education.  Most of the interesting stuff on that front right now is coming from the United States, which is of course sui generis as higher education systems go and so not necessarily applicable elsewhere, but its nonetheless vital to understand. Maybe the most

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June 11, 2019 No Comments

That Augar Report

If you pay attention to UK higher education, you will know that yesterday the long-awaited Augar Report (technically, the Post-18 Review of Education and Funding: Independent Panel Report, but its usually named after its chair, Philip Augar).  It’s a big study – over 200 fairly densely-argued pages – and since I’ve spent the entire day in meetings in Washington DC I haven’t had the time to peruse the document closely and my commentary is based to a considerable degree on

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May 31, 2019 No Comments

The Warren Proposal

No doubt everyone has heard about the ginormous ($1.25 trillion) promise that Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren made around post-secondary education last week.  But I suspect more people heard/saw the heat and noise about the promise rather than the promise itself.  So, herewith, a quick rundown and analysis: So, the first thing to note is that technically the package contained several policies.  The two major ones are about making tuition free in public schools, and a massive

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April 30, 2019 1 Comment

New Brunswick Brings the Stupid

Before we were rudely interrupted by the Ontario government doing something both interesting and mysterious on performance outcomes, I promised you all news out of New Brunswick. This matters to maybe fifteen of you, but you know, this blog is nothing if not faithful to geographically micro-targeting higher education nerds. So here we go. Recall that back under the Conservative government of Bernard Lord, the New Brunswick government introduced a titanically wasteful graduate tax rebate, which was a massive windfall

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April 16, 2019 No Comments

Strange, Inconsistent Arguments for Free Tuition

Every few weeks, it seems, someone shows up on twitter just aching to serve me some dubious justification for free tuition.   Let me recount two recent favourites. The first is the “oh but progressive taxation argument”.  It goes like this: Me: “You know universal subsidies for higher education are regressive, right?  On account of how the take-up rate for higher education – the likelihood of attending, the length of attendance, etc. – is positively correlated with family socio-economic status”?  (check back to

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March 12, 2019 3 Comments
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