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Category: Funding and Finances

Five Approaches to Subsidizing Students

Specialists sometimes like to talk as if post-secondary funding is some kind of arcane science.  But if you cut to the chase, it’s actually pretty simple.  You can tinker around the edges, and you can use different techniques to fund different parts of the system, but fundamentally there are only these five approaches: Subsidize nothing.  Some education is private and does not attract any subsidy.  In fact, in large swathes of Asia, Africa and Latin America (not to mention about

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April 12, 2018 1 Comment

Enough, Ontario

Our usual annual round-up of provincial budgets will come Wednesday, right after Saskatchewan posts its numbers, but as I was writing a draft of the piece I realized it makes almost no sense to talk about national trends in provincial funding without looking at what is going on in Ontario, because to a large extent it drives the national numbers.  And what is going on in Ontario – what has been going on in Ontario – over the past decade

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April 9, 2018 2 Comments

Debt-Free Policies

There’s a new policy fashion in student aid and it’s called “debt-free PSE” (or debt-free college, depending on which side of the border you reside).  But what does it mean? Some might think of debt-free PSE as being similar to tuition-free PSE, but in fact they are quite different in practice for two reasons.  The first difference is that under debt-free PSE, the level of tuition can be anything you please: the only thing that is constant is that all

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March 26, 2018 No Comments

Superclusters, Cold Fusion and Perpetual Motion

When writing last week about superclusters, I neglected to go through the actual “economic impact statements” that were being touted by the clusters themselves. It seems that the Industry Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), has to some degree accepted the statements.  And I think this is important because some of what is being suggested is pretty close to a national scandal. So, let’s take a quick look at what, allegedly, we’re getting for our $950 million in Supercluster investments.

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February 23, 2018 3 Comments

Two Final Arguments about Free Fees

Yesterday when talking about the bad arguments for universal free fees, I left out two of the more common arguments.  One of them I left out because it’s genuinely a much trickier argument to negotiate (and hence not one of the “ten bad arguments”) and the other because I plain forgot.  Both of these arguments came up during discussions online—check out my Twitter feed if you’re curious. But let’s go over the arguments now. Start with the latter, because we can

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February 21, 2018 2 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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