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Category: Worldwide PSE

The Four Logics of International Student Mobility

One of the significant challenges in analyzing policies around international student mobility is that there are multiple competing logics at work within the field.  However, the tensions between these competing logics are often not acknowledged, which makes it difficult to understand how to make choices between them. Today, we will look at four logics concerning in-bound student mobility, in order to disentangle them and promote sensible policy analysis. The first logic of internationalization is what I call the pilgrimage logic:

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February 11, 2019 1 Comment

Rationing Loans

While student loans are cheaper (and hence more commonly used) than grants, they still cost money, both in terms of interest subsidies and in terms of loan losses through loan defaults.  As a result, nowhere are they unlimited in scope.  Every government finds ways to ration loans.  Today, I thought I’d go through some of the ways governments do that and – in passing – help everyone understand in what ways North American loan systems are generous in comparison with

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February 8, 2019 1 Comment

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

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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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