The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Worldwide PSE

Roll On, Targeted Free Tuition

I’ve written a few times over the years about the spread of Targeted Free Tuition (TFT) programs.  Starting in Chile and Ontario in 2016 (after a false start in the UK in the late 1990s), they have started to spread around the world.  There are three new spots where the program is either now in place or under consideration, so I thought I would keep you all up to date on its spread.  South Africa.  You may recall that back in

Read More »
February 6, 2018 1 Comment

Antipodean Tuition News

All the really interesting news about tuition these days is happening south of the equator–let’s catch up. Chile.  When last we checked in on things in Santiago, we noted how President Bachelet’s gratuidad program had kind of foundered on the rocks of reality.  Having brought in free fees for the students in the bottom six income deciles at a cost of 607 billion pesos (roughly $1.25B Canadian), it turned out that the additional cost to make education free for the top four deciles

Read More »
December 14, 2017 No Comments

The Great Mistake

In the last couple of weeks, I have discovered an entirely new category of book: ones which you enjoy reading and contain plenty of fantastic information and insightful observations, but whose central thesis is demonstrably wrong and does not hold up to scrutiny.  The first was Masha Gessen’s The Future is History, about Russia’s transition from Gorbachev to now, and the second  – more relevant to this blog – is Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How

Read More »
December 1, 2017 No Comments

The Finances of World Class Universities (Part 4)

Over the past few days, I’ve been providing a lot of data on how well global “world-class universities” are faring (briefly: most of them are doing pretty well, the ones in Canada much less so).  But to some degree the real question is: does any of this matter?  Do higher expenditures per student actually result in greater academic output?  And if not, why not? To answer this question requires a quick detour into the issue of bibliometrics.  If you try

Read More »
November 10, 2017 No Comments

The Finances of World Class Universities (part 3)

One of the knocks against the whole idea of “world-class universities” is that it tends to reinforce institutional privilege; that it’s mostly about big universities with big reputations aiming to expand their financial advantage over everyone else.  Without speaking to motive, it is possible to use the financial data I’ve been writing about these last couple of days to examine empirically whether it is true the top dogs are gaining on everyone else or not.  And what the data tell us

Read More »
November 9, 2017 3 Comments

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...