Understanding how policy can affect university education is important for understanding how governments can promote human capital accumulation. This paper exploits historic changes to university funding policies in the UK to estimate the impact of tuition fees and maintenance grants on university participation. Previous work on this, which largely…

Britain is in the longest recession since the Second World War. Mass unemployment is back. The road to recovery could be long and bumpy. On the fiscal front, the deficit could be higher than the 175 billion British Pounds forecast for 2009-10. Bringing the deficit under control will require higher taxes and lower public spending. In an effort to…

Last October, when CBS News's Bob Schieffer welcomed 57 million television viewers to Hofstra University for the third presidential debate, the moment marked perhaps the best chance yet for the university to show off its efforts--with the help of some 4,000 journalists to cover the event--to remake itself from a sleepy commuter campus into a…

This paper reflects on the importance of study groups in contributing to a positive postgraduate experience and explores specific concepts, such as "disappearing behaviours" in contrasting the "official" languages of universities with the beneficial behaviours found through study groups. Additionally the paper advocates the…

The primary purpose of government provided student financial aid is to increase college access by bringing the out-of-pocket price of attendance within reach of more students. The basic idea is quite straightforward. If a good or service costs $100 to buy and the government gives consumers a $50 subsidy, then consumers need only spend $50 of their…

Public school funding in Massachusetts is based on foundation budget principles. However, funding formula modifications often create disparities between district foundation budgets and actual required spending levels. This study provides an in-depth look at Massachusetts' state aid formulas used between 2004 and 2009 and utilizes two approaches to…

The tension at the heart of pension politics is the incentive to satisfy today's claimants in the here and now at the expense of long-term concerns. Teacher pensions, in particular, pose two challenges. The first is that political incentives invite irresponsible fiscal stewardship, as public officials make outsized short-term commitments to…

How is your institution using its fiscal resources to its greatest advantage to fulfill the school's mission and meet expectations in today's economy? In an era of reduced resources and escalating costs, it's a question that every institution of higher education should be asking. Yet, despite the economic pressure, many campus leaders still need…

Purpose: Nursing home pay-for-performance (P4P) programs are intended to maximize the value obtained from public and private expenditures by measuring and rewarding better nursing home performance. We surveyed the 6 states with operational P4P systems in 2007. We describe key features of six Medicaid nursing home P4P systems and make…

In contrast to the prevailing image of monitoring systems as technical systems, it is proposed that they should rather be conceived of as social endeavors at exchanging information. Drawing on the monitoring and evaluation framework of Cornford, Doukidis, and Forster, the concept of information agreement is suggested as a way of assessing the…

Within the context of the school finance literature, the concepts of equity and adequacy raise a number of complex definitional and pragmatic issues. The purpose of this article is to clarify those issues and to use those concepts to evaluate the recent policy proposal called weighted student funding (WSF). Though WSF contains some…

Reform in higher education financing in Kenya has been occasioned by both endogenous and exogenous variables. Internal pressures of a declining economy, rapid demographic growth and increased inter- and intra-sectoral competition for scare financial resources, couple with external neo-liberal doctrine championed by global donors like the World…

Expanding economic opportunity in Texas depends on our state's ability to increase the college graduation rate for the thousands of college freshmen arriving on campuses each year. The pending budget bills would hamper college access for thousands of Texans through severe cuts to successful financial aid programs, including TEXAS Grants (Towards…

There is significant interest in reforming retirement plans for public school employees, particularly in light of current market conditions. This article presents an overview of the various types of state regulation of public pension plans that affect possibilities for reform. Nearly all of the various approaches to public pension plan protection…

Secondary school education is very critical in any education system because of the crucial role, it plays in catalyzing national development. Consequently, maintaining a high student enrolment at this level should be a priority for all countries. The Constituency Bursary Fund (CBF) was established by the government of Kenya through an act of…