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Category: Tuition

A Persistent Problem with Truth

When it comes to the subjects of debt and tuition fees, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) is the least trustworthy source on earth.  They lie.  Constantly. To see the latest collection, just look at this press release, which averages roughly one lie per paragraph.  For instance: “Since 2006, tuition fees have increased as much as 71 per cent in Ontario”.  The words “as much as” are doing a lot of work here.  For the vast majority of programs, the 5% annual increase

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April 1, 2013 8 Comments

Cross-Subsidies and Professional Programs

Canadian Lawyer magazine has an interesting little story about tuition rises at the University of Toronto.  Apparently, tuition there has been rising at 8% per year for some time now, and students, understandably, are upset. That’s a pretty run-of-the-mill story.  More interesting, however, was Dean Benjamin Alarie’s defense of the hikes.  To wit: “The cost of satisfying our obligations increases steadily over time, and without corresponding provincial [government] increases to our funding, we need to find a source to finance

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March 6, 2013 3 Comments

The Greek Choice

University World News ran an interesting piece the other day.  Apparently, the Greek government, as part of its continuing search for money, has devised a brilliant idea to get funds from the higher ed sector.  It’s going to close four universities, and reduce the size of the incoming class by about 30%. Well, that’s sure one way to do it.  Apparently, tuition fees weren’t considered – I’m not entirely sure why it wasn’t; it’s not as though they’re verboten in

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February 4, 2013 No Comments

UK Tuition Hikes Revisited

To recap: in 2012, average English tuition fees rose by 158% to roughly £8500, with no corresponding increase in grants.  As we’ve seen previously, this resulted in a fall in English applications of about 8%.  The effect was not evenly distributed among all groups: among 18 year-olds, the drop was 1-2% (depending on what base you use), whilst among applicants over 19, the decrease was 15-20%. But of course, it’s never best to rely on one year of data, especially

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January 31, 2013 1 Comment

The Effect of Tripling Tuition Fees: UK Latest

As most of you know, UK tuition fees more or less tripled this past year. The initial applicant/enrolment data from a couple of months ago (which I covered, here) indicated that applications fell by about 8%, but also that the drop came almost entirely from older students (among traditional-aged students, the drop was just 1%).  Worrying, but not apocalyptic. Last week, two new interesting pieces of data were released.  The first was application data by race; though Black and Asian

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January 21, 2013 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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