By Alex Usher. Here’s the issue: the NDP have decided to promise to make all Ontario student loans interest-free.  As a policy, this is pretty meh.  It’s not the kind of policy that increases participation because students don’t really pay attention to loan interest, and it’s not going to make loans a whole lot more affordable because Ontario forgives most loans anyway. More...

By Alex Usher. So, the international rankings season is now more or less at an end.  What should everyone take away from it?  Well, here’s how Canadian Universities did in the three main rankings (the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, the QS Rankings and the Times Higher Rankings). More...

By Alex Usher. I think most people now get that First Nations’ students don’t receive “free education”.  They pay tuition fees like everyone else.  What they do have (if they have “status”) is a parallel student aid system, which is called the Post-Secondary Student Support Program or PSSSP. If you are unclear on the difference between “status” and “non-status” Indians, have a peek at this primer from the âpihtawikosisân blog. More...

By Alex Usher. So, to Johannesburg, where South African Education Minister (and Communist Party chief) Blade Nzimande finally announced the government’s decision on tuition for next year. He was in a tricky place: students are still demanding free tuition (see my previous story on the Fees Must Fall movement here) and will not accept a hike in fees. More...

By Alex Usher. It was five years ago last month that Stanford set up the first MOOC.  MOOCs were supposed to change the world: Udacity, Coursera and EdX were going to utterly transform education, putting many universities out of business.  Time to see how that’s going. More...

By Alex Usher. The Globe carried an op-ed last week from Ken Coates and Douglas Auld, who are writing a paper for the MacDonald Laurier institute on the evaluation of Canadian post-secondary institutions. At one level, it’s pretty innocuous (“we need better/clearer data”) but at another level I worry this approach is going to take us all down a rabbit hole. Or rather, two of them. More...

By Alex Usher. Following up on yesterday’s piece about counting sessionals, I thought it would be a useful time to address how sessionals get paid.  Every so often, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) issues a press release asking that contract faculty get “equal pay for work of equal value”. More...