Tag: United States

Summer’s Over, New Sources of Exhaustion on the Way

Morning all.  The good news is: the blog is back!  The bad news is: that means summer’s over.  My apologies. Not that “summer” has been more than a vague reference to warmer temperatures this year.  Instead of a mixture of research and downtime, what we’ve had this summer is – for most, anyway – an all-out effort to make a semester (fingers crossed) of remote teaching workable.  The aggregate sum of all these incredible efforts is a remote semester that might not be

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The Outlook for International Students

Everyone is wondering: what’s going to happen to enrolments in the fall?  Particularly, international enrolments?  It’s a big question because for the last decade pretty much 100% of all the increase in institutional income has come from fee income, much of it from international students.  Take that income away, and we’re talking about major cuts: in Australia, which is only slightly more international fee-dependent than Canada, the hit to the sector this term is estimated at over $5 billion.  Some

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Comparative Bailouts

Following yesterday’s discussion re: how we might want to ask for money, I thought it would be useful to look at how other national governments are responding to post-secondary pleas for help.  For obvious reasons, the focus here is on countries which rely on private funding (i.e. fees) to fund their systems, as publicly-funded systems aren’t immediately affected by changes in student demand and can borrow to cover shortfalls. Let’s start over the pond in the UK, where the Universities

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From the Shelves of HESA Towers – “The Effective College”

Sometimes when you pick up an old book about higher education, it’s like stepping into a weird version of the present because the issues are exactly the same, only presented in the language of a different decade.  The book I picked off the shelf this week, though, is nothing like that – it’s actually a really interesting window into a totally different world of higher education.  And it’s actually not a book, but a “bulletin” of the Association of American

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Coronavirus (15) – Comparative Financial Carnage

Canadian universities and colleges have yet to release any figures about expected losses from coronavirus, but in other countries, estimates are popping up.  So, how bad might it get? Let’s start with the assumption that institutions in jurisdictions where institutions are supported mainly or entirely by government funds are the ones that are going to suffer the least.  I have yet to hear of any government anywhere making cuts in public funding to higher education during the emergency (ok, Alberta,

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