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Category: Policy

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

Income-Contingent Loans (Repaid Through the Tax System)

Every once in awhile, someone important says that what Canada/America really needs are income-contingent loans.  I usually reply, “we have income-contingent loans in Canada/America, that’s what the Repayment Assistance Program/Income Based Repayment program does”. To which the rejoinder is “no, no, that’s not income-contingent, what I mean by income-contingent is recovery of the loan is done automatically through the tax system, so you don’t run into all these messy issues around borrowers in repayment having not signed up for things”.

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March 3, 2016 No Comments

When is Free Tuition Free?

You would be forgiven, over the past 24 months or so, for growing ever more confused about when tuition is “free” and when it is not.  The reason, in part, is that “free” tuition is in the eye of the beholder. You’d think it would be as easy as saying “no fees”, but it’s actually not that simple.  What if, instead of a fee, there is a variable “contribution” or a gradate tax?  What if fees are charged to a

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March 1, 2016 No Comments

A Great Day for Student Assistance

I was going to stay off the blog this whole week (I need a reading week, too!), but there was a budget in Ontario yesterday.  A weird and wonderful (if somewhat under-documented) budget, which is going to change the way we think about student aid, tuition, and affordability in Canada for decades to come. Here are the basics: all of Ontario’s different grants and loan remission programs are being merged together into one big up-front grant program (all the provincial

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February 26, 2016 7 Comments

Innovation Ecosystems: Promise and Opportunism

We sometimes think of innovation policy as being about generating better ideas through things like sponsored research.  And that’s certainly one part of it.  But if those ideas are generated in a vacuum, they go nowhere – making ideas spread faster is the second pillar of innovation policy (a third pillar – to the extent that innovation is about new product-generation – has to do with venture capital and regulatory environments, but we’ll leave those aside for now). Yesterday, I discussed why the key to speeding up

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December 8, 2015 2 Comments

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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