The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Tag: United States

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

Read More »
August 30, 2022 No Comments

America’s Student Debt Cancellation Morass

It has now been something on the order of 26 months since anyone in the United States has been required to make payments their student loans.  As in Canada, these payments were suspended at the outset of the pandemic.  But whereas in Canada repayments re-started after about six months (Oct 1, 2020), in the United States they have yet to do so.  Understanding why gets us all a little closer to understanding the disfunction that is the American Higher Education

Read More »
May 26, 2022 2 Comments

Tennessee’s Free Tuition Experiment Reconsidered

Long time readers may remember about six years ago I examined a program known as the Tennessee Promise, one of the earlier “free tuition” programs in the US.  Technically, it was not a “free tuition” scheme, but rather what was known as a “last dollar scholarship”, meaning that after applying all other scholarships or need-based aid, the state brings the “net tuition” to zero.  What I found was that if you looked just at students coming out of secondary school

Read More »
April 20, 2022 1 Comment

Campus Unrest and Public Funding: Then and Now

If you’ve been watching the American higher education scene for the last couple of years, you will no doubt have noticed a spate of bills wending their way through various state legislatures that are widely understood as attacks on higher education.  These include bills weakening tenure, bills making it effectively illegal to teach American history (lest White students feel guilty about the actions of their ancestors), or the defunding of courses on programs on gender or women’s studies.  The narrative

Read More »
April 5, 2022 1 Comment

Faculty Salary Data, 2020-21

We haven’t looked at faculty salaries in awhile, so let’s do that. Getting a handle on recent faculty salary data is easy: it’s the one thing that Statscan does both rapidly and well in the higher education field.  It may take them 30 months to produce student enrolment data, and they collect no data at all about college tuition or non-academic staff, but by gum they can process university salary data in under 12 months! (Yes, this does tell you

Read More »
January 11, 2022 1 Comment
Load More

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...