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Category: Tuition

Summer Updates from Abroad (2): The UK Teaching Excellence Framework

The weirdest – but also possibly most globally consequential – story from this year’s higher education silly season comes from England.  It’s about something called a “Teaching Excellence Framework”. Now, news of nationally-specific higher education accountability mechanisms don’t often travel.  Because, honestly, who cares?  It’s enough trouble keeping track of accountability arrangements in one’s own country.  But there are few in academia, anywhere, who have not heard about the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (or its nearly-indistinguishable predecessor, the Research Assessment

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August 4, 2015 1 Comment

Random Crazy Thoughts About Funding Formulas

A few days ago, I attended a meeting of an advisory group on the review of the Ontario University Funding Formula. I can’t of course tell you what went on inside the meeting, but I thought I would share with you some of the (creative? crazy?) ideas that I had while inside them. One issue which has popped up both in Ontario and in some meetings I had in DC last week, was the problems created by having money automatically

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June 5, 2015 2 Comments

The 2016 Presidential Race

I’ve been spending a bit of time in the United States the last couple of weeks (Indianapolis, Boston, Washington DC), and one of the things I’m noticing is the extent to which political discourse – which, ludicrously, already centers around the 2016 Presidential Race – is focussed on issues in higher education.  Specifically: issues of tuition and student debt. This is interesting for a couple of reasons.  First of all, it’s an enormous shift from about ten years ago, when

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May 28, 2015 No Comments

Free Tuition: A Rocky Rollout in Chile

So the big news last week in Santiago was the announcement of the start of the “free tuition” plan, which was part of President Michelle Bachelet’s election platform in 2013.  Only it’s not quite free tuition, and it’s still not clear how it will be paid for. I’ve written previously (back here) about the Bachelet promise, and the potential difficulties with implementing it in a country where most higher education is provided by private institutions, and forced nationalization is expressly prohibited in

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May 25, 2015 No Comments

The Minimum Wage Shtick

One little rhetorical trick you sometimes see anti-tuition types using is a comparison between tuition and minimum wage.  Last year for instance, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative put out a piece saying that working at minimum wage (which is in fact relatively rare for students, who typically earn about 25% more than minimum wage), students today have to work more than twice as much as students thirty years ago in order to pay tuition.  What should we make of

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April 29, 2015 4 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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