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Tag: Australia

Policy Stasis in Australia

Saturday was election day in Australia, and pretty much everyone knew what was going to happen.  The clapped-out two-term Coalition (Liberal-National, i.e. right-wing) government, which was so internally faction-riven that it had three prime ministers in six years via a series of “spills” that Canadian political geeks find so thrilling: the smooth Malcolm Turnbull defenestrating the Jurassic Tony Abbott in 2015, and winning an election before being booted by caucus last fall and replaced by the somewhat more Conservative Scott

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May 21, 2019 No Comments

Excellence Initiatives

Over the past couple of decades, countries have designed policies to improve their research universities and make them more “world-class”, largely on the assumption that this will pay some kind of economic dividend.  A lot of these policies involved what became known as “excellence initiatives” – projects that concentrated spending on a restricted number of institutions with the idea that these extra resources would propel these universities into some kind of global elite.  This raises the question: do they work?

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March 11, 2019 2 Comments

Antipodean Student Organization Struggles

With the Ford government being the first to take aim at compulsory student unionism in Canada (he will not be the last; in Alberta, Jason Kenney’s UCP has a similar policy resolution on its books), it is worth taking a more detailed look at how the move to make fees optional has played out elsewhere.  Specifically, Down Under, where these policy ideas were first put into practice in the under the name “Voluntary Student Unionism” (VSU, in Australia) and “Voluntary

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January 23, 2019 No Comments

Canada’s International Education Strategy Mark II (bis)

A couple of people have pointed out that I may have rushed to some conclusions about the meaning behind the International education strategy.  Isn’t it possible, some asked, that this wasn’t about a new strategy to attract students, but a strategy to send students abroad? (Small aside: that this question is still open five days after the announcement is a little bizarre. If the government had its act together on something like this, we’d know the answer by now.  Certainly, the usual suspects like

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November 27, 2018 No Comments

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

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December 14, 2017 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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