By Alex Usher. One major trend of the last couple of years in global higher education has been the arrival of a wave of “free tuition” policies in jurisdictions that formerly charged them and which – in some cases – have substantial private higher education sectors.  But announcing free tuition is one thing: actually pulling it off is another.  Let’s take a quick look-in at how things are playing out in various parts of the world. More...

By Alex Usher. The Shanghai Rankings (technically, the Academic Ranking of World Universities) came out a couple of weeks ago.  This is the granddaddy of all international rankings; the one that started it all, and still perceived as the most stable and reliable measure of scientific hubs; essentially it measures large concentrations of scientific talent.  And there were some very interesting results for Canada, the most intriguing of which is the fact that McGill has fallen out of Canada’s “top 3”, replaced by McMaster. More...

By Alex Usher. Last week, HuffPost ran a story highlighting a newsletter from CIBC Economics about higher education.  It was actually a pretty meandering letter (CIBC Economics pieces on higher education are usually notable for their interesting use of data and somewhat shallow understanding of actual policy – here’s an earlier example). More...

By Alex Usher. The 2015-16 version of Financial Information of Universities and Colleges Survey (which, confusingly, doesn’t include community colleges) was released over the summer.  As in previous years I’m going to do a little summary of what it tells us about how income and expenditure has change over one year and five years.  Just so we’re all clear, all figures here are in real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) dollars. More...

By Alex Usher. So, yesterday was the annual tuition fee data dump from Statscan.  Probably worth it to go over the data just a bit to see what the story is. More...

By Alex Usher. I’ve recently been doing a little bit of work recently on student success and I am struck by the fact that there are two very different approaches to student success, depending on which side of the Atlantic you are sitting on.  I’m not sure one is actually better than the other, but they speak to some very different conceptions of where student success happens within an institution. More...

By Alex Usher. We seem to be in a period in Canada where money for “skills” is in vogue, mainly because it is seen as a panacea for lots of quite separate problems. At a really high-order level, you’ve got the Innovation ministry in Ottawa pounding the drum on skills because the tech industry says skills are a bottleneck to whatever kind of tech-powered Nirvana the Minister imagines Canada to be headed towards. More...