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Category: Tuition

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

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
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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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