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Tag: United States

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

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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

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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

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January 11, 2022 1 Comment

Same But Different (Part 2)

Yesterday, I outlined the key similarities between the US and Canadian higher education systems.  Today, let’s talk differences.  The most obvious dissimilarity is some of the institutional forms. Religious colleges are much thicker in the ground in the US, as are liberal arts colleges (neither is unknown in Canada, but they take up a lot less space).  Community colleges look vastly different: in Canada they are their own sector, with most programs leading to stand-alone vocational credentials, though “vocational” is

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November 3, 2021 1 Comment

Same But Different (Part 1)

One of the challenges I find in doing comparative higher education work is that because everyone in the field went to university, they think they know what a university is.  But the fact is universities around the world are different: they are run on different logics; they aspire to do different things and hence can have differing operational processes.  Making useful comparisons, or trying to infer motives for institutional actions in other countries, can be very difficult. One of the

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November 2, 2021 1 Comment

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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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