Tag: United States

Friday Book Reviews

Four books that have been across my desk recently: Higher Education Accountability. This is a short and sweet book by Seton Hall prof Robert Kelchen which provides maybe the best taxonomy of accountability measures in higher education measures I have ever seen.  Internal/external, to government, to the public – you name it, its in there, all with copious references to major events in US higher ed over the past ten years.  It perhaps occasionally resembles notes for a course a bit

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Why the American Free Tuition Debate is Different (redux)

As many of you know, I’ve been around the block a few times around the issue of “free tuition” (see here here here and here for a few examples if you’re interested/have forgotten/find these pieces amusing).  But one thing that I’ve found fascinating about the developing American discourse on free tuition is how very different it is from that of other countries.  I’ve written before about how the presence of private universities changes the nature of the debate in the US, but the actual rationale for universality is

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The Real Competition is Closer Than You Think

I’ve recently been dismissive of the notion that Canada is “falling behind” in higher education since everyone seems to insist on making ludicrous comparisons with places like China, Switzerland and Singapore.  But upon a little bit of further digging, it turns out there is one of our very close competitors which is doing rather well these days, one we probably should be worried about despite the fact that we’ve mostly been ignoring it since the Financial Crisis of ’08. It’s our

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Free Tuition Developments

One major trend of the last couple of years in global higher education has been the arrival of a wave of “free tuition” policies in jurisdictions that formerly charged them and which – in some cases – have substantial private higher education sectors.  But announcing free tuition is one thing: actually pulling it off is another.  Let’s take a quick look-in at how things are playing out in various parts of the world. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte (Luzon’s

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Student Health (Part 3)

You know how it is when someone tries to make a point about Canadian higher education using data from American universities? It’s annoying.  Makes you want to (verbally) smack them upside the head. Canada and the US are different, you want to yell. Don’t assume the data are the same! But of course the problem is there usually isn’t any Canadian data, which is part of why these generalizations get started in the first place. Well, one of the neat

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