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Category: Access

Adversity Scores

Who deserves to go to university?  Particularly the prestigious ones with selective admissions?  It’s easy enough to say “everyone”, or “anyone with the ability to benefit from it”, but when it comes to any specific institution, usually the demand for spaces exceeds the supply.  When that happens, some type of rationing procedure comes into play.  In nearly every country in the world (Canada is a rare exception), this rationing gets done either partly or completely on the basis of a

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May 22, 2019 3 Comments

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 1)

Canada is a vast and largely self-satisfied land.  And when it comes to higher education, we do pretty well.  Depending on the measure of access one chooses, we’re either above average or top of the pack.  We have the biggest and best-funded college system in the world, one which is highly regarded for its innovativeness.  On research, we punch at or above our weight.  Our faculty – the full-time ones, anyway – are the best-paid of any in the world

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April 8, 2019 3 Comments

How Equitable Can We Get?

Last month, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) published a paper entitled “Redefining Access to Postsecondary Education”.  It raises a number of interesting questions about access in Ontario (which apply to Canada generally), so it’s worth examination. Stripped to the basics, the document lays out the following point (quoted from the Executive summary) that Ontario funding and student aid policies “have resulted in a dramatic increase in overall enrolment at Ontario’s colleges and universities over the last two

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March 7, 2019 No Comments

Rationing Loans

While student loans are cheaper (and hence more commonly used) than grants, they still cost money, both in terms of interest subsidies and in terms of loan losses through loan defaults.  As a result, nowhere are they unlimited in scope.  Every government finds ways to ration loans.  Today, I thought I’d go through some of the ways governments do that and – in passing – help everyone understand in what ways North American loan systems are generous in comparison with

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February 8, 2019 1 Comment

Costing Loans

One of the weirder sub-fields of student loan policy concerns how loans are accounted for in national budgets and statistics.  This sounds like an abstract consideration, but in fact it has the potential to drive student aid and access policy in some very unexpected directions.  (I know, I know, this may be my wonkiest post ever, and I may get one or two things wrong because I’m not an accounting expert, so bear with me). For a really good primer

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February 7, 2019 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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