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Category: Canada

The Tools to Plan

Governments are really keen on planning as a way to improve access to education. “If only people would plan more,” goes the refrain, “people would be able to explore more options, make better financial decisions, etc., etc.” True as far as it goes; so why are governments themselves the biggest culprits in impeding good financial planning? Say you’re a student in grade 12 deciding where to go to school next year. You’d probably like to know how your choice of

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November 14, 2012 No Comments

Student Aid Tax Rates

Anyone who thinks taxation is overly complicated and onerous in this country needs to spend a day or two in the shoes of a student. That’s because our tax system has absolutely nothing on our student aid assessment system. Student aid in Canada is distributed based on something called “assessed need”, which is defined as “assessed costs” minus “assessed resources” (not real costs or real resources, because those are subjective). Essentially, government has to ask students about their resources and

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November 12, 2012 1 Comment

Narcissism of Small Differences – Admissions Edition

Why do Canadian universities make admissions so complicated? A couple of years ago, for a client, I took a look at the number of different undergraduate admissions requirements there were to various universities.  What I found was that at comprehensive universities in Ontario, there tended to be no fewer that 15 separate sets of admission requirements to various programs or faculties, and at some universities it was as high as 20. Nearly all of them required grade 12 English (though

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November 8, 2012 1 Comment

Spousal Income

Over the past decade, successive Canadian governments have tried to give bigger and bigger breaks to parents through the student aid system. Loan eligibility has steadily been widened to richer and richer families by making expected parental contributions less onerous. But for some reason, no recent government has seen fit to change spousal contribution rates. Since the mid-1990s, this rate has been set at 80% of the spouse’s combined net income over a threshold which varies a bit by province

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November 7, 2012 No Comments

Australia is Better than Canada

…at least as far as thinking through the implications of globalization on education.   And I’m not talking just about the trivial matter of attracting more students to study at their universities. About a week ago, the Australian government released a forward-looking White Paper called Australia in the Asian Century which charted a set of strategies to improve Australia’s chances of benefiting from the continuing Asian economic boom.  Some of those strategies were education-related; one was to get ten Australian universities into the world’s

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November 6, 2012 4 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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