By Alex Usher. Sometimes Canadian universities drive me up the wall.  Mostly, it’s when they start lobbying for other people to take action in areas where the clearest problems lie within their own wheelhouse.  I speak in particular of Study Abroad and Work-Integrated Learning. More...

By Alex Usher. Yesterday, I described Income Share Agreements (ISAs) as basically a version of Milton Friedman-like Human Capital Contracts, which are very much like privately administered graduate taxes. More...

By Alex Usher. Every once in awhile, someone comes up a “new” concept in student financing and people get very excited about it.  As in most other policy fields, the “newness” is a matter of perspective and debate: there’s only so many ways you can lend students money and many of the “new” ideas are just old ideas that got discarded for various reasons and resurrect either because circumstances have changed or because proponents aren’t aware of the history (or both). More...

By Alex Usher. One of the things post-secondary education does poorly is questioning its orthodoxies, particularly when it comes to the value of what it is the sector produces.  I’m talking in particular about graduate skills. More...

By Alex Usher. If you’ve hung around higher education for even a millisecond, you’ll know that the sector is often told that it should listen more to industry. More...