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Category: Worldwide PSE

Islamic Student Loans

READER’S NOTE: HESA does not have connections to any organizations that offer interest-free loans.    As-salaam Alaikum. Every once in awhile, someone in the student movement hears tell of interest in Islam being prohibited, thinks about student loans for a microsecond, and then comes up with the idea that student loans are “unislamic” and, hence, culturally inappropriate.  This, in the past, has led some in Canada to claim that the whole student aid system needs to be revised and made more

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December 12, 2012 14 Comments

Manageable Debt, Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at the principles underlying the discussion on manageable student debt; today we examine how Canadian governments try to help students manage debt, and whether or not their efforts are as efficient as they could be. Manageable debt loads are a function of three things: total debt, interest rates, and student income.  The last of these three is only vaguely susceptible to government control, but governments can control program interest rates and total debt loads through direct subsidies. 

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December 11, 2012 No Comments

The Limits of Vocational Education in Developing Countries

I was interested to read Canadian International Development Assistance Minister Julian Fantino’s big policy speech last week. It made headlines for its apparent dissing of aid groups and its lauding of the potential role of the private sector (which, big shock, is not universally popular in international development circles), but what I found intriguing was the way it emphasized human resource development as a focus of future Canadian policy. The specific example Fantino used was a string of vocational and technical schools

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November 30, 2012 1 Comment

Australia is Better than Canada

…at least as far as thinking through the implications of globalization on education.   And I’m not talking just about the trivial matter of attracting more students to study at their universities. About a week ago, the Australian government released a forward-looking White Paper called Australia in the Asian Century which charted a set of strategies to improve Australia’s chances of benefiting from the continuing Asian economic boom.  Some of those strategies were education-related; one was to get ten Australian universities into the world’s

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November 6, 2012 4 Comments

African Higher Education – What Should Be On Everyone’s Radar

Here are the basic things you need to know about Africa as a higher education market: 1) It has a fast-growing population, with lots of young people to be educated. 2) Large bits of it – mostly the English and Portuguese bits, less so the French-speaking ones – are getting rich off the commodity boom. Ghana, in particular, is going gangbusters right now. This means higher education is now much more affordable than it used to be. 3) However, the

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November 5, 2012 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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