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Tag: Reports

Baumol vs. Bowen

A fascinating paper came out recently on SSRN, which should be of interest to anyone concerned with the economics of higher education.  Its purpose was to answer a most interesting question: is cost-inflation in higher education driven by internal factors, or external ones? There are two leading theories about cost-inflation in higher education.  The first, proposed by William Baumol (whose new book I mentioned last week), argues that external factors are to blame.  Education, as a labour-intensive good, says Baumol, will always see

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December 18, 2012 No Comments

“Mainly, it is confusing”

A colleague (and frequent reader) pointed me in the direction of a highly entertaining document about Canada’s international education pretensions. It’s an executive summary of some qualitative research (i.e., focus groups) that Ipsos-Reid conducted in Brazil, India and China on DFAIT’s behalf with respect to “Imagine Education au/in Canada”, the Canadian education “brand” which is famously unpronounceable in either language. Now, you might think that research of this nature might have informed the drafting of that report of the Advisory Panel on

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November 15, 2012 3 Comments

That International Education Report

The Federal Task Force on International Education reported last week. It was… how to put this? Very Canadian. In essence, the report reads as though the goal of keeping all major stakeholders sweet trumped the goal of providing clear, bold thinking about Canada’s internationalization strategy. It’s worthy without challenging any conventional thinking. It puts forward an ambitious goal without spending much time working out the details of getting it done (the phrase “stakeholders should co-ordinate” does too much work in this

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August 20, 2012 1 Comment

Does Debt Affect Career Choice?

A lot of hypotheses about the negative effects of student debt (some of which I was responsible for, 15 or so years ago), have, over time, been shown to be wrong. The one about debt being a serious deterrent to access, for instance (at least at current levels of borrowing); or the one about how increased student debt delays family formation. But what about the hypothesis that higher levels of student debt might leading students to take “jobs that pay

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May 22, 2012 1 Comment

A Duty Ignored

One of the reasons universities have had such success in attracting students over the years is the promise they hold for better employment. Over 80% of students say that “getting a better job” is a main reason for going to university. It’s not the only reason they go, of course; most have some kind of intellectual interest in the subjects they study. But the promise of good job outcomes is pretty central to the appeal of a university. So why

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May 1, 2012 14 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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