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Category: Worldwide PSE

League-Table Rankings, Sumo Style

Most university rankings (U-Multirank is the big exception) take a league table format originally used by esteemed psychologist, eugenicist and baseball enthusiast James McKeen Cattell in his early rankings early 20th century (for more on Cattell see back here).  One effects of borrowing league tables as a metaphor is that there is an implicit assumption that the inhabitants of that table are able to move up and down the league table as baseball or football teams do.  If a team can crash

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September 28, 2018 4 Comments

“Free Fees” in New Zealand

New Zealand recently became the darling of a certain wing of the post-secondary world when it’s new Labour Government, led by Jacinda Arden, translated a second-place finish in the 2017 election into government (via some deft coalition negotiations) and proceeded to implement a free-tuition plan. Tuition-free universities aren’t new to New Zealand; in fact the whole country was more or less tuition free until 1991.  It was in that year that a former Labour government (of an unusually pro-market, privatizing

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September 27, 2018 2 Comments

Targeted Free Tuition: A Global Analysis

Good morning, all. Today, HESA is publishing (jointly, with the Higher Education Policy Institute in London, England) a paper entitled, Targeted Free Tuition: A Global Analysis. This paper is the product of months of surveying an emerging trend in government-financed student aid and what is arguably the most important new idea in higher education financing currently floating around the world. We posit that Targeted Free Tuition (TFT) might be the most progressive student aid policy, simultaneously eliminating tuition-based financial barriers

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September 20, 2018 4 Comments

Canada’s Well-funded and Highly Equitable PSE System

Yesterday was Education at a Glance release day.  That’s usually the time when I take a look at the latest data from across the OECD  and point out that in fact we in Canada have it pretty good.  Or, at least that was the piece I expected to be writing yesterday morning.  Until I found out that Canadian data was missing from more than just the usual number of tables.  Statscan was more annoying than usual this year, which means

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September 12, 2018 No Comments

André Picard Shills for the One Percent

You may have heard about New York University’s appalling plan to make tuition free at its medical school.  This is, I am sure, a great gimmick to promote NYU among the upper classes of the Northeastern US.  But it is a terrible use of money.  The beneficiaries will come from BY FAR the most privileged stratum of society and once they graduate they will themselves join that same ludicrously privileged stratum.  If one were trying to design a post-secondary subsidy that was as regressive as

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August 31, 2018 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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