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Category: Tuition

Private Returns, Heterogeneous Products, and Insurance Markets

My last blog post on university tuition – which said that higher education has both public and private returns and charges should be arranged commensurate with the latter – seems to have sparked a variety of responses by email and on the blog.  Some of you were trolling, I think, or playing devil’s advocate, anyway. Others had serious objections.  Regardless, the counter-arguments essentially came in two varieties, and I want to take a moment today to answer both. The “But-lower-levels-of-education-have-private-returns-too-so-why-not-charge-for-K-12?”

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November 3, 2017 No Comments

Tuition: Walking and Chewing Gum Simultaneously

Since we’re talking tuition this week, I thought I’d take an opportunity to tee off on one of the weakest arguments out there on this subject.  You know, the one that goes like this: Higher Education is a Public Good Public Goods should be free Yay, free tuition. There are actually two responses to this argument, one narrow and one broad. The narrow argument is that in economic terms the first premise is wrong and hence the second and third

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October 19, 2017 6 Comments

Why the American Free Tuition Debate is Different (redux)

As many of you know, I’ve been around the block a few times around the issue of “free tuition” (see here here here and here for a few examples if you’re interested/have forgotten/find these pieces amusing).  But one thing that I’ve found fascinating about the developing American discourse on free tuition is how very different it is from that of other countries.  I’ve written before about how the presence of private universities changes the nature of the debate in the US, but the actual rationale for universality is

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October 18, 2017 4 Comments

Tuition Fees in Canada, 2017-18

So, yesterday was the annual tuition fee data dump from Statscan.  Probably worth it to go over the data just a bit to see what the story is. The data everyone likes to focus on is the “average undergraduate tuition fee by province”.  This year, it looks like this (note that “fees” here do not include ancillary fees, only tuition proper): Figure 1: Average Domestic Undergraduate Tuition Fees by Province, 2017-18 The other number that people always look out for

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September 7, 2017 No Comments

Did CIBC Really Just Call for Lower Tuition?

Last week, HuffPost ran a story highlighting a newsletter from CIBC Economics about higher education.  It was actually a pretty meandering letter (CIBC Economics pieces on higher education are usually notable for their interesting use of data and somewhat shallow understanding of actual policy – here’s an earlier example).  The newsletter touched on a number of issues around educational supply and demand, but what HuffPost glommed on to was what a point about tuition in STEM programs and led with the headline “CIBC argues against

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September 5, 2017 No 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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