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Tag: United States

A Second Thought About Half-Way Through A Pretty Awful Day

Forgive the intrusion.  But our neighbour to the South electing a quasi-fascist narcissist isn’t an every day occasion.  There are some significant short-term consequences for Canadian higher education, and I thought I would just quickly enumerate them so that debate and preparation can begin. First, the chances of a recession in the next couple of years just shot up quite a bit.  Tearing up NAFTA also means tearing up the FTA: there will be a pause in business investment while

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November 9, 2016 2 Comments

Why I Do This Stuff

It’s Election Day in the America.  It’s a day that always make me think about how I got into this business. Back in 1992, I was trying to stay out of a godawful job market by doing a Q-year in Economics at McGill (ended disastrously: don’t ask).  On November 2nd, I was sitting with some friends in the Shatner Building reading a New York Times story about the celebrations being planned in Little Rock for the next evening.  It was

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November 8, 2016 2 Comments

The Yale Tuition Postponement Option

If you pay attention to student assistance, you know about income-contingent loans.  And if you’ve heard about income-contingent loans, you probably know that the first national scheme debuted in Australia back in the late 1980s.  You might even know that the first theoretical exploration of income-contingent loans was made by Milton Friedman back in the 1950s (actually, he was talking more about human-capital contracts, but close enough.  And you might occasionally wonder: why did it take 30 years to go

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October 19, 2016 1 Comment

Hillary’s Higher Education Plans

Barring some sort of catastrophe, it now seems pretty clear that Hillary Clinton will be the 45th President of the United States.  There is a reasonable chance (51.6% in Monday’s FiveThirtyEight forecast) that the Democrats could regain the Senate and an outside chance that they could also regain the House.   Those odds probably change a bit in the Democrats’ favour once some post-grope polls come out later this week, but the basic outline of a post-November 7 world – Hillary

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October 11, 2016 1 Comment

Affordability of Higher Education in Canada and the United States

About a decade ago, my colleague Kim Steele and I did a comparison of the affordability of public higher education in all ten Canadian provinces and fifty US states. In general, Canadian provinces did not do well; yes, Canada has lower costs for students, but its student aid system is less generous and – this is worth remembering – Americans are wealthier than we are. And so, once you adjust costs and net costs for family purchasing power, it turned

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June 14, 2016 1 Comment

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.

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