Category: Canada

Why (Almost) Everyone Loves International Students (Part 2)

Yesterday, I showed how good international students were for universities’ bottom lines.  But it’s not quite as simple as I made it out to be.  Whether admitting international students makes sense or not depends on four factors: 1)      How much of the income do you get to keep?  In Quebec, international students in “regulated” programs (which include Arts) are worth essentially nothing to institutions because the government claws it all back.  On the other hand, in block-grant provinces (and in Saskatchewan,

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Why Everyone Loves International Students (Part 1)

A nice simple post today: why universities are going bananas for international students. The first figure shows undergraduate tuition fees for international students in each province.  They range from a little under $10,000 in Newfoundland, to just over $25,000 in PEI.  The national average for this period is $18,840; in Ontario it is $23,000. International Undergraduate Tuition Fees by Province, 2012, in $2013               What’s more, fees for international students have been going up

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Mobility Responsibilities

Saying that we should remove barriers to student mobility sounds like a motherhood issue.  But scratch a little deeper, and you’ll see that, in fact, Canadians are pretty equivocal on the concept. For starters, while everyone loves inbound mobility (come here!  It’s a great place!), there’s a pretty deep streak of protectionism in Canadian provincial governments on the issue of outbound mobility.  The sentiment of “let’s keep our kids at home” runs deep in many parts of the country.  It wasn’t until the advent

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Nova Scotia Ditches a Bad Subsidy

About a decade ago, a really bad policy idea started making its way across the country’s “have-not” provinces.  I can’t remember if it started in Saskatchewan or New Brunswick, but within a couple of years it had spread to Manitoba and Nova Scotia, as well.  The details (and generosity) of this policy varied somewhat, but the gist of it was this: “let’s pay our graduates not to leave the province by refunding a portion of their tuition, via tax reductions,

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Happy Birthday, Canada Student Loans Program (Part the Last)

For the first thirty or so years of its existence, the CSLP changed little, and was rarely the subject of any political attention.  The annual loan maxima drifted gradually upwards from its initial $1,000 per year, but the only real innovations were the introduction of interest relief (the nucleus of today’s Repayment Assistance Program) in 1984, and a short-lived, ill-advised experiment in administrative cost-recovery in 1990 – during which the government levied a 3% fee on loans to pay for overhead,

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