Now, what is the case about? Stripped to its essentials – and moving past a tremendous amount of beside-the-point back-and-forth nonsense, mainly because we lack basic data on average-time-to-completion by type of disability – the case concerns whether we should plan student aid around annual levels of assistance or by degree/diploma. More...
It’s the next-to-last blog of the year, and so as usual it’s time to review the various higher ed-related books I have read over the course of 2019, just in case some of you are dying to spend the holidays boning up on higher ed history/policy. I will spare you a potted description of all the 40-odd books, and just stick to the highlights. More...
I suspect nearly all professors agree with the need to defend the right to criticize the institution; I also suspect many would draw a line when it comes to persistently attacking the integrity of one’s departmental colleagues. That’s a conversation that in the TRU case would have been very enlightening indeed. More...
The UK goes to the polls on Thursday. There are one or two things of higher importance at stake than higher education (mainly: which party gets to drive the entire country off a cliff and at what speed), but it’s still worth looking at what ideas are bouncing around over on the other side of the pond. More...
I was briefly in Warsaw last week talking about university rankings and how to improve overall institutional performance. Poland is one of the most interesting higher education systems in the world right now, so I thought it would be worth talking about what’s going on there. More...
There has been change, sure. Within the academy, we give scholarships to women in STEM, and to some degree we do better at promoting women into senior positions (though there is still a ways to go). Formally, at least, rules are changing. But elsewhere? The Yonge Street van attack, the missing and murdered Indigenous women, the increasingly visible misogynist attacks on women in public life. More...
To some, this might seem a horrible question: why ration? The reality is, no country has a genuinely universal loan program. Even in the few places where, in theory, 100% of undergraduates can access loans, this access is usually limited by degree (you can only get one, or at least one at any given level) or to a certain number of years. Elsewhere, a variety of limits exist. More...
Welcome back to this little series. On Monday and Tuesday we looked at loans – how to pay for them and how to design repayment systems. Today, I want to introduce grants into the mix (to be clear, I’m only talking about grants where need is the primary criterion – there’s a whole other set of policy considerations about merit-based aid, which I’m going to leave to one side during this discussion). More...
For decades, student loans only worked one way: on a regular amortization basis. If you borrow, you repay on a regular monthly basis after graduation, just like one pays a regular amount each month on a mortgage. Even within this framework, there are a lot of policy elements one can adjust. More...
Over the years, I have concluded that one of the reasons policy debate can be so stifling is we’re usually debating options within existing policy parameters: that is, “fixes” to existing policy. It’s pretty rare that anyone talks about “greenfield” policies in areas where no policy ever existed. This is kind of a shame, because it means people don’t really understand the process of trade-offs that go into original policy-making. More...
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