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Category: Policy

The Cultural Aspect of “Affordability”

In tuition policy circles, there are a lot of “grass is greener” perspectives: that is, people arguing about affordability based on foreign examples of either high or low tuition.  But one of the problems with looking at “affordability” of higher education in cross-national contexts is that affordability is a matter of perspective.  What’s affordable in one country often isn’t in another.  I don’t mean this simply in the trivial sense that some countries are richer than others.  Obviously a $3,000

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March 18, 2016 No Comments

Parental Contributions: the Policy Implications

So, yesterday I showed you some of the data comparing expected parental contributions for Early Childhood Education (ECE) and PSE, and how much more we ask of younger, poorer parents compared to older, generally wealthier ones. This is frankly somewhat perverse.  Parents of children in ECE are usually at quite an early stage in their careers, and have little in the way of cash reserves.  They are often brand-new homeowners, or saving up to buy their first house or condo. 

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March 16, 2016 2 Comments

ECE Contributions vs. PSE Contributions

Morning all.  Today, HESA is releasing a paper called “What We Ask of Parents: Unequal Expectations for Parental Contributions to Early-Childhood and Post-Secondary Education in Canada”, by Jacqueline Lambert, Jonathan Williams, and me.  The gist of it is: “Holy cow, we ask parents to contribute a lot more to ECE than PSE – why is that?” You can click here to read the whole report, or you can see the short version as an op-ed in today’s Globe and Mail.  What I want to

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March 15, 2016 3 Comments

Guaranteed Annual Incomes: the Student Angle

One hot topic that seems to be on everyone’s social policy radar these days is the idea of a “basic income guarantee”, or a “mincome”, or a “guaranteed annual income” (GAI – the term I will use in this post).  A recently-announced pilot project in Finland got quite a bit of press; the federal Minister of  Families, Children and Social Development, Jean-Yves Duclos – who examined the idea thoroughly in his previous career as an economist at Laval – says the

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March 14, 2016 No Comments

The Coming Cost Debate in Ontario

Today I want to think about how the new Ontario system of student assistance is going to play out.  I think there is the potential here for quite an interesting and useful debate; but the timetable is somewhat tricky. As you will recall, the Government of Ontario is rolling out a plan to provide enough grants to fully offset tuition in most university and college programs for students from families with incomes of less than $50,000.  That’s going to happen

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March 8, 2016 1 Comment

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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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