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Category: Worldwide PSE

Costing Loans

One of the weirder sub-fields of student loan policy concerns how loans are accounted for in national budgets and statistics.  This sounds like an abstract consideration, but in fact it has the potential to drive student aid and access policy in some very unexpected directions.  (I know, I know, this may be my wonkiest post ever, and I may get one or two things wrong because I’m not an accounting expert, so bear with me). For a really good primer

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February 7, 2019 No Comments

Loans Work

If you spend any time looking at student aid research, you’ll be struck by how much empirical evidence there is on the effectiveness of grants (or, more broadly, “changes in net tuition”), and how little there is in terms of the effectiveness of loans.  Thus, one might be tempted to think that this means grants are effective and loans are not, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are a couple of reasons why it has been difficult

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February 6, 2019 No Comments

Pathways to Reform

There is a small sub-genre of higher education books that I call “University Procedurals.” The are microscopically detailed accounts detailing how institution X accomplished Y in mind-numbing committee-meeting-by-committee-meeting detail.  A good example of this genre is Mary Emison’s Degrees for a New Generation, which details the emergence of a new curriculum at the University of Melbourne in the mid-2000s, which I detailed back here.  Alexandra Logue, the former Provost of the City University of New York, has now written what may be

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February 1, 2019 1 Comment

British Innovation Lessons

I’ve been reading David Edgerton’s new book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, which presents a bracingly contrarian view of Britain’s 20th Century.  It is, I think, particularly intriguing concerning whether the British left actually more nationalist than socialist (a question which I think might also be usefully asked of Canada’s own left).  In the middle of the book, it presents some fascinating information on the mid-century role of science and innovation in the British economy and suggests

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January 30, 2019 1 Comment

Blatant Self-Promotion

I have a book out.  Well, a volume I co-edited anyway, with my colleague Jason Delisle of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.   It’s called International Perspectives in Higher Education: Balancing Access, Equity and Cost, and it’s available now from Harvard Education Press (if you’re interested in buying it do so direct from Harvard at the link above, because Amazon.ca says delivery takes 1-3 months).    The book’s a slightly eclectic set of essays which touches on topics like student

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January 25, 2019 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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