By Mel Broitman. The Harper government boasts that foreign students brought $8-billion into the Canadian economy in 2010. When you consider what’s at stake, and the federal government’s goal to double the international student intake by 2022, it borders on the absurd to think that in promoting Canadian education abroad, the Canadian government is short of funds to serve a glass of water. Such is the way Canada frequently presents itself as an international student recruiter. This was on display recently when the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade held a major Canadian education promotion event in Lagos, Nigeria, in January. Read more...

By Lu Ann La Salle. The cost of a four-year university degree for a child born in 2013 could rise to more than $140,000 due to tuition inflation, a new study says. But three-quarters of parents with children under 18 haven’t made a detailed estimate of the total cost of post-secondary education, said BMO’s Wealth Institute in a report released on Wednesday. Tuition and other costs for a four-year university degree now can cost more than $60,000, the report said. Read more...

By Roger Moore. The draft letter of expectation that the provincial government recently sent to the University of Alberta is great cause for concern for those who value the benefits of research. Research is essentially an assembly line: at the forefront there are fundamental researchers extracting the raw knowledge about the nature of the universe. These knowledge breakthroughs are then refined and processed by applied researchers to create the technological breakthroughs that industry then takes and uses to create devices and processes that increase our standard of living. If this were the oil industry, applied research would be a refinery and basic research would be the prospectors and drillers who find, extract and feed the crude oil to the refinery. Nobody would ever suggest that we stop prospecting and drilling for oil and focus purely on refining, because once the existing reserves ran out, the refinery would shutdown. Read more...

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA. Alumni of elite colleges are accustomed to getting requests for money from their alma mater, but the appeal that Harvard sent to thousands of graduates on Monday was something new: a plea to donate their time and intellects to the rapidly expanding field of online education. For the first time, Harvard has opened a humanities course, The Ancient Greek Hero, as a free online class. In an e-mail sent Monday, it asked alumni who had taken the course at the university to volunteer as online mentors and discussion group managers. Read more...

The supposed value of a humanities degree from Harvard?
OMG…this was my first thought on reading this article “Harvard Asks Alumni for Help With Humanities MOOC” published in yesterday’s Chronicle of Education. [I've just read it as I'm a little behind in my reading.]  Wow is my response….and I’d agree with  ssaulvolk, one of the commentators on the article called who wrote 10 hours ago “Good news for adjuncts who thought they were at the bottom of the academic barrel! Harvard has come up with an even lower category. Kudos to the university with the GNP-sized endowment.”
YES! Clearly Humanities graduates either need to be underpaid, undervalued and they are cheap i.e. free for service. What Harvard has indirectly stated is that people with degree in the humanities have little or no value. Why? Well, they’re clearly willing to work for nothing according to Harvard!! One has to wonder what value does a PhD in the humanities have? Clearly, not much. Way to go Harvard in setting the bar for the manner in which people with Humanities PhD and degrees ought to be treated. You’d hope that perhaps the university would be far more politer, less judgmental to its faculty and students, and alumni but obviously they’re’ worthless. If this is the case…what about the rest of us??  (I didn’t get my PhD from Harvard just in case you’re wondering.)

By Ry Rivard. Universities must slow the rising cost of higher education or risk losing the support of the American public, the president emeritus of Princeton University, William Bowen, argues in his new book. To do that, college administrations should turn to online courses to combat the “cost disease,” a term explained several decades ago by Bowen, a labor economist. The disease is simple: higher education prices are hard to bring down because labor prices rise while productivity remains the same. Bowen says that in academe, like a string quartet, there’s traditionally been little chance for colleges to reduce the number of laborers or the time it takes to finish the work. The cure, Bowen writes, may be online education. He argues online education can reduce costs without undermining students’ education. While he goes out of his way to make sure nobody thinks online education will be a silver bullet, Bowen's argument is likely to receive attention because of his time at Princeton and at ITHAKA studying new technologie. The book, Higher Education in the Digital Age (forthcoming from Princeton University Press), frames the current and coming debates instead of answering questions about the future of online learning. About a third of students now take at least one class online. Read more...