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Tag: United States

The Politics of Student Loan Debt

I am sure most of my readers are aware of the Biden Administration’s plans to forgive student loans.  However, what may have gone under the radar is the way the current administration is staking a lot of money on an attempt to re-build the country’s student loan system.  The basics are this: the Democrats want to make student aid repayment easier in three ways.  The first is by raising the repayment threshold – that is, the income level at which

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February 8, 2023 1 Comment

What 20 Years of Rankings Tells Us About Institutional Performance

It occurred to me the other day that the oldest set of international rankings – that is the Academic Rankings of World-class Universities (ARWU), also known as the Shanghai Rankings – have now gone through 20 iterations.  I’m not one who believes that year-to-year changes in rankings mean much (too much noise, not enough signal), but twenty years of data?  As an old colleague of mine once said, if a research result is strong enough, even a weak methodology will

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January 24, 2023 4 Comments

The Decline of American Higher Education

As recently as five years ago, Americans were generally pretty proud of their higher education system.  Sure, there were complaints, but even when the criticisms were more systemic, they were usually prefaced by the words “we’ve got the best system in the world, but…” It occurred to me the other day that I hadn’t heard that phrase in a while, and not just because COVID has reduced the frequency of my jaunts to DC, where I most often heard it. 

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September 15, 2022 No Comments

Relative Effort

People often want to compare jurisdictional efforts with respect to postsecondary education investments.   These are typically exercises in choosing denominators: the numerator (total spending) is constant, it’s just a question of how to normalize raw expenditures.  In Canada, we tend to normalize expenditures in one of two ways: either in per student terms, or in terms of gross domestic product.  Figures 1 and 2 show these two measures across Canada.  In short, Newfoundland and Labrador and Saskatchewan look the best

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September 13, 2022 1 Comment

US Debt Cancellation – What Just Happened?

So, the big news last week in world higher education was the Biden administration finally cancelling some student debt and – in theory, who knows? – resuming student loan repayments in December of this year (they were suspended in the Spring of 2020 in the chaos of early COVID.) Let’s break down Wednesday’s announcement. The government forgave the following debt: Up to $20,000 of Department of Education debt for borrowers who apply and meet the following three criteria: have outstanding

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August 30, 2022 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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