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Category: Politics

Marketing “Free Tuition”

With a major student aid reform almost certain to be announced in the federal budget today, it’s worth pondering how the Ontario Liberals have managed to get themselves into a bit of a mess with how they’ve marketed their own changes to student aid. The Ontario reform, as you will recall, was a shuffling of money rather than an infusion of one (note: some of the shuffling was federal shuffling, not provincial shuffling – that is, the provincial changes are

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March 22, 2016 No Comments

An Orgy of Bad Policy in Saskatchewan

Two weeks from today, voters in Saskatchewan go to the polls.  You may be forgiven for not having noticed this one coming since it has barely registered in the national press.  And that’s not just because of the usual central Canadian obliviousness, or because it’s a fly-over province; it’s also because this is one of the least competitive match-ups since…. well, since the last time Brad Wall won re-election.  CBC’s poll currently gives the Saskatchewan Party a 25 point lead

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March 21, 2016 4 Comments

A Moment of Truth

So, next Tuesday, federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau will announce the new Liberal government’s first budget.  What should the PSE community expect? Well, it’s going to be a deficit budget, we know that much.  Underlying weakness in the economy means that tax receipts are lower than expected, and the projection for a balanced budget in 2016-2017 that the Tories presented last year has now turned into a $12 billion deficit, even before an extra dollar was spent.  They’ll inflate that

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March 17, 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

“Corporate, Neo-liberal Universities”

Yesterday, we examined Jamie Brownlee’s claim that government’s were engaging in “austerity” in order to ensure that universities became “corporatized”.  The conclusion was that you have to use some pretty idiosyncratic definitions of austerity to make the term stick even half-way; and even then, it’s impossible to make the charge stick after about 1995.  But what about the more general charge of universities becoming “corporatized”?  Does that have any traction? The main problem with examining this claim is that the

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February 11, 2016 4 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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