The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

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Category: Funding and Finances

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (3)

Welcome back to this little series.  On Monday and Tuesday we looked at loans – how to pay for them and how to design repayment systems.  Today, I want to introduce grants into the mix (to be clear, I’m only talking about grants where need is the primary criterion – there’s a whole other set of policy considerations about merit-based aid, which I’m going to leave to one side during this discussion). Theoretically, the grants vs. loans debate is one of the most important

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December 4, 2019 1 Comment

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (2)

Now that we’ve decided on a loan system, we have to start thinking about how we are going to recover any money that we lend.  For decades, student loans only worked one way: on a regular amortization basis.  If you borrow, you repay on a regular monthly basis after graduation, just like one pays a regular amount each month on a mortgage.  Even within this framework, there are a lot of policy elements one can adjust.  The length of the

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December 3, 2019 No Comments

PSE in Alberta – Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at the history of post-secondary education in Alberta; today, I want to look more at some of the data on finances and student numbers, just to give you all a better sense of how the province compares to the rest of Canada. Let’s start with tuition fees.  For the last quarter-century or so, Alberta has stayed pretty close to the Canadian average.  Until 2013-14 it was above the average; since then, it has been below.  But the

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November 29, 2019 7 Comments

PSE in Alberta – Part 1

With things in Ontario starting to calm down, Alberta is the next frontier in Canadian PSE changes.  The October budget asked institutions for some pretty significant mid-year adjustments, and if the already-published departmental business plan is anything to go by, it looks as though institutions are going to have to absorb several hundred million dollars more in cutbacks over the next couple of years.  How Alberta institutions react to this will be instructive, because they’ll be experiencing in fast-forward what

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November 28, 2019 No Comments

Perpetual Growth

Just a quick one today, as the combination of a laptop failure and a MLS final in Seattle made the blog I had wanted to write impossible to finish.  It’s about a short but interesting piece that UBC professor Charles Menzies wrote for the Ubyssey a few weeks ago concerning the growth imperative of modern universities.  In it, he poses the question of why universities think they must grow in order to succeed and while he frames it in environmental terms, the subtext

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November 11, 2019 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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