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Tag: Economics

Overproducing Graduates For The Win!

A few weeks ago, my colleague Melonie Fullick teed off in her University Affairs column on some of the rhetoric around calls to increase the number of PhDs. Universities always like these kind of calls (and – guilty – I’ve made them myself), because they mean some combination of more money and more horsepower to do advanced research (in the Sciences at least). But universities are obviously producing a lot more PhDs than they are ever going to hire, and

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April 8, 2016 1 Comment

The Dollar Quandary

If you haven’t been hiding under a rock these last few months, you may have noticed that the US dollar is on a roll.  And it’s not just on a roll in Canada, where the price of oil has reduced the value of our own currency; since mid-2014, the US dollar is up over 20% against a trade-weighted basket of currencies. This creates some interesting conundrums and strategy options for pricing international education. The change in the dollar’s status means that everyone’s

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February 19, 2016 3 Comments

Lessons from Scandinavia on the Value of Tuition Fees

Whenever you hear somebody complaining about higher education funding in Canada, it’s usually only a matter of time before someone says “why can’t we be more like Scandinavia?”  You know, higher levels of government funding, no tuition, etc., etc.  But today let me tell you a couple of stories that may make you rethink some of your philo-Nordicism. Let’s start with Denmark.  The government there is trying to rein public spending back in from a walloping 56% of GDP, and

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February 4, 2016 2 Comments

Marginal Costs, Marginal Revenue

Businesses have a pretty good way of knowing when to offer more or less of a good.  It’s encapsulated in the equation MC = MR, and shown in the graphic below.                 Briefly, in the production of any good, unit-costs fall to start with as the benefits of economies of scale start to rise.  Eventually, however, if production is expanded far enough you get diseconomies of scale, and the marginal cost begins to rise.  Where the

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January 21, 2016 3 Comments

Would Lower Tuition or Lower Student Debt Improve the Economy?

Short answer: not really, no.  But judging by this Chronicle Herald article last week entitled “Eliminating Tuition Fees would Buoy Bluenose Economy“, bad ideas die hard.  So let’s think this one through. As I wrote back here, there are basically four ways to lower tuition or reduce student debt.  Government can raise taxes to pay for it, borrow to pay for it, re-allocate spending to pay for it, or reduce the cost of educational provision (i.e., cut spending on equipment and salaries).  If you

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January 18, 2016 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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