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Tag: Targeted Funding

Ignoring Naylor

Cast your mind back to 2017 – 2018, when, in theory, everybody agreed that Canada’s Fundamental Science Review – aka the Naylor Review – was a Good Thing That Must Be Implemented.  And so we got the 2018 Budget, which dispensed billions of dollars, mostly back-ended, over six years and which was touted as the Greatest Research Budget Ever (via some competitive counting of the sort I described last week) even though in total it amounted to about a 14% real increase over

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December 6, 2021 1 Comment

Polish Higher Education Reforms

I was briefly in Warsaw last week talking about university rankings and how to improve overall institutional performance.  Poland is one of the most interesting higher education systems in the world right now, so I thought it would be worth talking about what’s going on there. Among the former socialist states that were not part of the Soviet Union, Poland is the largest, has the longest history as an independent state, and has the longest history of mass opposition to

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December 9, 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

Targeted Free Tuition: A Global Analysis

Good morning, all. Today, HESA is publishing (jointly, with the Higher Education Policy Institute in London, England) a paper entitled, Targeted Free Tuition: A Global Analysis. This paper is the product of months of surveying an emerging trend in government-financed student aid and what is arguably the most important new idea in higher education financing currently floating around the world. We posit that Targeted Free Tuition (TFT) might be the most progressive student aid policy, simultaneously eliminating tuition-based financial barriers

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September 20, 2018 4 Comments

Supporting Students or Institutions?

Over the last few years I have noted a significant trend in provincial government spending across Canada, one which we termed “feed the student, starve the schools”.  Basically, governments are a lot happier giving money to the children of middle-class   voters  students than they are to universities and colleges because there are more votes there.  And besides, that way you can claim you’re doing something for access (even if the dollars are sometimes targeted inefficiently). Well, OK.  But access isn’t everything. 

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February 13, 2018 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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