The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Tag: Australia

The Australian Revolution

Something important is happening in Australia. Briefly: a right-wing coalition took power in Australia a few months ago.  Said coalition created a “commission of audit” to look over public finances, and recommend “economies”; unsurprisingly, it came back with recommendations much like the ones the Commission on the Reform of Ontario Public Services would have, if Don Drummond, instead of being a mild, respected former public servant, had been an Orc with especially low blood-sugar.  Among the recommendations: large cuts in government

Read More »
May 22, 2014 1 Comment

Income-Contingent Loan Problems

Everyone who’s ever given thought to the matter thinks that income-contingent loans are superior to mortgage-style loans.  At any given level of debt, it’s always preferable for low-income borrowers in repayment to have the option to suspend payments, and make them up at a later time.  Pretty much all the objections to income-contingency – especially here in Canada – are about matters extraneous to the actual method of loan repayment (e.g. fees would rise, interest is too high, etc.). The

Read More »
December 5, 2013 No Comments

Using PIAAC to Measure Value-Added in Higher Ed: US Good, Australia Abysmal

A few weeks ago, when commenting on the PIAAC release, I noted that one could use the results to come up with a very rough-and-ready measure of “value added” in higher education.  PIAAC contains two relevant pieces of data for this: national mean literacy scores for students aged 16-19 completing upper-secondary education, and national mean literacy scores for students aged 16-29 who have completed Tertiary A.  Simply by subtracting the former from the latter, one arrives at a measure of

Read More »
November 13, 2013 6 Comments

The Monash-Warwick Alliance

About fifteen months ago, I wrote that the next big thing in cross-border higher education was going to be an actual merger of two institutions, in different countries.  Now, we have a real live experiment to watch, thanks to the Monash-Warwick Alliance. This didn’t get a lot of press when it was announced (I certainly missed it), but it’s a reasonably big deal nonetheless.  In a nutshell, these two large, young  universities (Monash dates from 1958, Warwick from 1964), with

Read More »
January 28, 2013 2 Comments

What Goes Up May Come Down

About six years ago now, when policymakers in Canada started to get excited about international education, many hoped that foreigners might be able to subsidize our expensive system of higher education.  I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it, but the thinking was: if the Australians could manage it, presumably so could we. To date, our results have been pretty good.  International enrolments keep rising. The money keeps on flowing, offsetting the weakness in government funding.  What

Read More »
January 18, 2013 No 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...