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Category: Worldwide PSE

Oregon’s “Pay It Forward” Scheme and the ICR vs. Graduate Tax Problem

You may have heard some rumblings from south of the border over the past few months with respect to a program called Pay It Forward (PIF).  The brainchild of a student group called Students for Educational Debt Reform, this idea was picked up by the Oregon assembly last summer; within a few months, over a dozen state governments were examining similar draft legislation. The basics of the program are these: instead of paying tuition, students agree to pay a percentage

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March 17, 2014 1 Comment

A European Perspective on Three-Year Degrees

Glen Murray may be gone, but the allure of three-year bachelor’s degrees remains.  In future, my guess is that they’ll be much like the German apprenticeship system – an educational deus ex machina that successive generations of Canadian politicians will “discover” anew every couple of years.  So it’s probably worth asking, after roughly a decade of Bologna implementation, how Europeans themselves feel the whole experience is panning out. My own sense from talking to people across the continent is that, while no

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March 11, 2014 6 Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Senegal

Hi all.  I’ve been in Dakar, Senegal this past week, developing a student program here.  Here’s a quick snapshot of the place: Senegal is home to francophone Africa’s oldest university, l’Universite Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD), sometimes known simply as the University of Dakar.  It’s one of the few institutions on the continent that predates independence.  For a very long time, it was the country’s only university – francophone African countries were slower to expand higher education opportunities than anglophone, for reasons

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February 28, 2014 No Comments

A More Productive Debate on “Differentiation”

One of the big topics over the past three years in Canada – and particularly in Ontario – has been that of “differentiation”.  The idea of differentiation as a boon to the university system essentially traces back to Adam Smith.  Just as in Smith’s hypothetical pin factory production can be increased multi-fold, by having different workers work on different aspects of pin-making, so too can a university system  be made more productive by having institutions concentrate on different aspects of

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February 26, 2014 6 Comments

Chinese Higher Education: Where to From Here?

So, now that China has 30 million students and a half-dozen “world class universities”, where to next? Well, the first thing to note is that the system hasn’t finished growing.  While the major metropolitan areas of the north and centre have PSE attendance rates that approach those in Canada, outside of those very small areas, the average is less than half that.  Even in fairly prosperous coastal provinces like Zhejiang and Guangdong, participation rates are less than half of what

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February 14, 2014 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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