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Category: Student Aid

The Canada Student Grant Cut

Somewhat remarkably, no media have picked up the story that the Canada Student Grants were slashed in last week’s budget. Possibly, this is because the government did not issue a press release saying in big letters, “HEY, WE ARE LOADING MORE DEBT ON LOW-INCOME STUDENTS”, and, without such an admission, no one wants to do the hard work of working out what just is going on.   So, let me save everyone the trouble. Here’s what happened: In the 2019 election,

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November 10, 2025 No Comments

Quebec’s Private Student Loan Moment

Although we tend to think of student loans as either being something done by banks for profit or by governments to correct for market failures, there is a third type of student loan: namely, private, not-for-profit companies using a mix of private and public funds for charitable reasons. Probably the most globally significant institution pursuing this path is the Dominican Republic’s FUNDAPEC, which has its origins in a private sector effort to establish higher education in that country during a

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October 28, 2025 1 Comment

That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in.  You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about enrolment trends, but you’d mostly be wrong. While few countries are as bad as Canada when it comes to up-to date enrolment data, it’s a rare country that can give

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October 8, 2025 No Comments

Student Aid in Canada: The Long View

Note: this is a short version of a paper which has just appeared in issue 72:4 the Canadian Tax Journal. How short? I’m trying for under 1000 words. Let’s see how I do. Canadian student aid programs existed in scattered forms since just after World War I but became a “national program” when the Dominion-Canadian Student Aid Program (DCSAP) was created in 1939. Under this program, the Government of Canada provided block cash grants to provinces who administered their own

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February 4, 2025 No Comments

Student Debt by Ethnicity

Hi all. Just a quick one today, this time on some data I recently got from StatsCan. We know a fair a bit about student debt in Canada, especially with respect to distribution by gender, type of institution, province, etc. (Chapter 6 of The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada is just chock full of this kind of data if you’re minded to take a deeper dive). But to my knowledge no one has ever pulled and published the data

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January 27, 2025 No Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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