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Category: Tuition

Affordability and Independence

There are two constructs that make it extremely difficult to talk sensibly about who should pay for higher education.  The first is “affordability” and the second is “independence”, in the sense of students’ independence from the rest of their family.  It’s worth exploring these concepts in detail to see how they complicate analysis Let’s start with affordability, a term which unfortunately has become equated with “accessibility”, which it clearly is not.  Simply put, “affordable” is something you can pay for. 

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September 14, 2018 No Comments

André Picard Shills for the One Percent

You may have heard about New York University’s appalling plan to make tuition free at its medical school.  This is, I am sure, a great gimmick to promote NYU among the upper classes of the Northeastern US.  But it is a terrible use of money.  The beneficiaries will come from BY FAR the most privileged stratum of society and once they graduate they will themselves join that same ludicrously privileged stratum.  If one were trying to design a post-secondary subsidy that was as regressive as

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August 31, 2018 No Comments

Canada’s Affordability Success Story

Canadians are regularly bombarded with stories about “rising tuition” and “ever-mounting student debt”, the implication always being that the middle-class is being priced out of higher education, access to education is being threatened, etc.  If these stories were true, it would indeed be worrying.  The problem is, they are mostly nonsense and fuelled by ignorance of just how much Canada’s system of student assistance has grown and changed over the past couple of decades. As figure 1 shows, tuition has

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August 29, 2018 1 Comment

The State of Canadian Post-Secondary Education, 2018

Good morning.  Today sees the publication of The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, 2018, our first annual review of Canadian post-secondary education institutions, students, faculty, and finances.  You can download the whole thing here, you can wait for me to dribble the whole thing out in blog-sized chunks over the next couple of months only with added sarcasm, or both! But today what I want to underline is what is effectively the lead story from the report, which has

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August 28, 2018 3 Comments

Miracle at Purdue?

[the_ad id=”12142″] If you follow US higher ed news at all, you will have heard the story of Purdue University, Indiana’s other, somewhat more STEM-focussed, state university system.  Under the leadership of former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Purdue has managed to freeze in-state tuition stable for the last seven years. How is this happening, you ask?  By what miracle does a major university like Purdue, which regularly ranks in the top 60 or 70 universities in the world, which relies on

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April 24, 2018 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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