Tag: United States

So How are Enrolments Looking, Anyway?

Back in the spring, there was widespread panic that postsecondary enrolments – particularly international enrolments – would crumble if students had to spend a whole term online.  What do we know about how this has turned out this fall? Well, in other countries, this is a relatively straightforward question to answer.  In the UK, national data on new university acceptances are published right around the time students go back to school.  This probably overstates enrolments (not everyone who is accepted

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Two Great Books on Admissions

An important shift during the last half-decade or so in US higher education is the serious consideration that increased selectivity at the top 5-10% of institutions may be doing real damage to the goal of social mobility.  It’s not just data nerds like Raj Chetty doing big data projects on outcomes: it’s becoming a topic of national conversation.  If you want to learn more about it in detail, you couldn’t do better than two new books: Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets in and

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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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