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Category: Universities

Manageable Debt, Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at the principles underlying the discussion on manageable student debt; today we examine how Canadian governments try to help students manage debt, and whether or not their efforts are as efficient as they could be. Manageable debt loads are a function of three things: total debt, interest rates, and student income.  The last of these three is only vaguely susceptible to government control, but governments can control program interest rates and total debt loads through direct subsidies. 

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December 11, 2012 No Comments

Manageable Debt

One of the big questions in student loans these days concerns “manageable debt”.  How much debt is manageable, exactly?  And how do we best help borrowers whose debt is unmanageable? As nearly everyone agrees, manageable debt is a flexible concept. For someone with no income, pretty much any amount of debt is unmanageable.  As income rises, however, an increasing amount of debt can be serviced.   Interest rates and repayment terms matter too, of course;  any established debt-to-income ratio is a

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December 10, 2012 No Comments

A Zinger from HEQCO

To One Yonge Street, and the offices of the redoubtable Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), who yesterday released a small publication with the unassuming name, The Productivity of the Ontario Public Postsecondary.  The title may be a little on the soporific side, but the contents are anything but. There are some real gems in here.  Did you know that 39% of all granting council funding went to Quebec?  OK, the grants on average are somewhat smaller than they are

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December 7, 2012 2 Comments

The Other Shoe Drops

So, the victorious Parti Québécois, who believe so much in education, who spent all spring and summer hand-wringing and moaning about how that mean, mean Jean Charest was just so… so mean because he wouldn’t invest in Quebec’s youth, and whose election was a massive and historic victory because they cancelled those terrible, evil, neo-liberal tuition fee hikes, has just cut subsidies to all universities’ and colleges’ by five percent. Oh, and the cuts aren’t coming next year, they’re coming this year. 

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December 6, 2012 1 Comment

Access to Opportunity

There’s been a fair bit of talk over the past few months about the practice of articling in Ontario.  Specifically, the problem is that there are too many law school graduates for too few articling positions.  The situation has deteriorated to the point where the Law Society of Upper Canada has released a major report outlining an “alternative work experience,” in order to deal with the surplus of students who don’t get “real” articling positions.   For what it’s worth, I tend to

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December 5, 2012 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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