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Tag: Student Loans

Budget 2023’s Three Key Decisions on Students

There are three student-finance related measures to watch for in the upcoming budget.  One of them concerns graduate research funding and the other two concern student financial aid.  With this Liberal Government, one’d normally think all three decisions would land in favour of “more! more! more!”.  But there are faint signs that this government is starting to grasp that it has a real spending problem, and that makes these three decisions difficult to predict, for whenever the budget actually comes.

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February 13, 2023 2 Comments

Canada’s New and Wasteful Student Loan Interest Policy

In the Fall Economic Statement last Thursday, Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the government will eliminate student loan interest not just on loans going forward, but also retroactively. This was not out of the blue – the government promised this in the last election.  It remains, however, a disastrous idea.  Hundreds of millions of dollars a year for no real net benefit (at least in the field of education).  I have already laid out why this is a

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November 7, 2022 No Comments

The Long Strange History of Loan Remission Policies

One thing that long marked Canada out as an oddball amongst nations in higher education policy is the reliance of its student aid systems on something called “loan remission”.  A series of recent policy moves has nearly eradicated the use of this policy tool. Loan remission is pretty simple.  Students take out a loan at the start of a year of studies and then before repayment begins some of it gets written off.  Sometimes it’s done annually, sometimes it’s done

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September 8, 2022 1 Comment

US Debt Cancellation – What Just Happened?

So, the big news last week in world higher education was the Biden administration finally cancelling some student debt and – in theory, who knows? – resuming student loan repayments in December of this year (they were suspended in the Spring of 2020 in the chaos of early COVID.) Let’s break down Wednesday’s announcement. The government forgave the following debt: Up to $20,000 of Department of Education debt for borrowers who apply and meet the following three criteria: have outstanding

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August 30, 2022 No Comments

Ontario Provincial Election Manifestos 2022

Thursday is election day in Ontario and somehow, a Conservative government that spent the last two and a half years managing the pandemic with a clownish and occasionally malevolent incompetence seems poised to win another four years with a majority government.  Still: I do these manifesto reviews come hell or high water, so here we go. Let’s start with the fact that the NDP and Greens both agree that the Ford cuts to OSAP need to be reversed, all three

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May 31, 2022 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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