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Tag: United States

Harvard. I Mean, Really.

Last week, the Harvard Crimson printed some unofficial estimates on the university’s current capital campaign.  Be forewarned: these numbers will give many of you a heart attack, so to soften the impact I’m going to lead  by providing some background on the campaign.  Universities raise money.  Sometimes it’s small donations, sometimes it’s big ones.  Sometime the university spends that money right away, sometimes the money goes into an endowment, which means the capital is available in perpetuity and the university

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April 21, 2016 1 Comment

Why the US Free Tuition Debate is Different

Free tuition is a growing political issue in the United States.  Most of the free tuition plans out there (for instance in Tennessee and Oregon) are effectively variations of what was recently introduced in Ontario – that is, a re-packaging of student aid so that some students pay “net zero” in college – or at least community colleges.  The plan President Obama has presented to Congress over the past twelve months or so seems to be a bit more expansive –

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March 30, 2016 No Comments

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

(#fake)Tenure, Governance, and Academic Freedom

If you follow higher education news from south of the border, one scrap you’ll probably have noticed over the past year or so is the one over tenure in Wisconsin.  Until recently, tenure provisions at the University of Wisconsin were inscribed in state law.  Last year, Wisconsin Governor and erstwhile presidential candidate Scott Walker decided to remove tenure protection, leaving the University’s Board of Regents to inscribe it in their own rules.  At the same time, the Governor gave university

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February 8, 2016 3 Comments

The Nature of Universities: Multicultural Edition

I find myself increasingly annoyed with particular a line of rhetoric that academics sometimes use when they want to make a point.  “The university is not a corporation”, they say, “it is a community of scholars dedicated to the truth – if it is not that it is nothing.” You know, the Steffan Collini-types. Two things here.  First, a modern university actually is demonstrably a corporation, which is indeed a very good thing for everyone who likes to get a

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November 23, 2015 1 Comment
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