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Category: Tuition

How Awful is Scottish Access Policy?

Here’s a story you might have heard about access policy in Scotland: the (right-wing, neoliberal) Labour government of the late 1990s imposed tuition fees on Scottish students and students were very hard done by. About a decade later, the (lefty, progressive) Scottish Nationalist Party government abolished tuition fees and everything was suddenly a student paradise.  You may even have heard about the commemorative stone the ex-SNP First Minister Alex Salmond had installed at Heriot-Watt university bearing the words “The rocks

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March 15, 2018 No Comments

Two Final Arguments about Free Fees

Yesterday when talking about the bad arguments for universal free fees, I left out two of the more common arguments.  One of them I left out because it’s genuinely a much trickier argument to negotiate (and hence not one of the “ten bad arguments”) and the other because I plain forgot.  Both of these arguments came up during discussions online—check out my Twitter feed if you’re curious. But let’s go over the arguments now. Start with the latter, because we can

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February 21, 2018 2 Comments

Roll On, Targeted Free Tuition

I’ve written a few times over the years about the spread of Targeted Free Tuition (TFT) programs.  Starting in Chile and Ontario in 2016 (after a false start in the UK in the late 1990s), they have started to spread around the world.  There are three new spots where the program is either now in place or under consideration, so I thought I would keep you all up to date on its spread.  South Africa.  You may recall that back in

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February 6, 2018 1 Comment

Antipodean Tuition News

All the really interesting news about tuition these days is happening south of the equator–let’s catch up. Chile.  When last we checked in on things in Santiago, we noted how President Bachelet’s gratuidad program had kind of foundered on the rocks of reality.  Having brought in free fees for the students in the bottom six income deciles at a cost of 607 billion pesos (roughly $1.25B Canadian), it turned out that the additional cost to make education free for the top four deciles

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December 14, 2017 No Comments

What a National Housing Strategy Tells Us About Higher Education

The big news in Canada last week was the unveiling by the governing Liberals of a “National Housing Strategy”.  Housing is a good policy file to watch for higher education policy types, because housing and higher education share a lot of qualities. This might not seem like an obvious policy analogy, but hear me out.  Shelter, like higher education, is often viewed as a “right”, but it’s one where the base assumption is (in North America, anyway) is that it

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November 29, 2017 1 Comment

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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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