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Category: Student Aid

The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, 2026

Morning all. The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada 2026 is out today, and you can download it here. Sincere thanks to our partners at Studiosity, Riipen, Pearson, Duolingo, Intellectual Property Ontario and Westcliff University for helping to produce this year’s version and keep it free for everyone to use. Anything you want to know about Canadian post-secondary education should be in here – but if it’s not, email us and tell us what you think we should add next

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September 9, 2026 No Comments

You Can’t Kill the U.S. Department of Education (But You Can Break It)

The news from the United States these days, as far as higher education is concerned, sometimes seems uniformly bleak, but US higher education operates in an unbelievably decentralized environment. Not only are there differences across states, across the public-private divide, and to some extent across accreditation zones, but even within the federal system, there’s not necessarily a uniformity of approach, given three branches of government, and even within the executive sphere, different approaches from the major funders of education, including

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April 16, 2026 No Comments

Comparing Student Loan Outcomes

Yesterday, I said that the system of English student loans were the worst in the world. And I know the skeptical among you probably thought “how can he say that? Where is the comparative data?” So, today, some data on student loans programs around the world which will show, definitively, how awful the English system is. Let’s start with a basic piece of contextual data, which is that there are huge differences between countries when it comes to the percentage

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March 25, 2026 1 Comment

The World’s Worst Student Loan System

If you read the UK education press at all, you’ll have noticed a serious uptick recently in the number of stories describing the current student loan system as “a scam” by  Government back-bench MPs and “a mess” by a former Deputy PM who played a large role in designing it. What’s going on, you ask? How bad is it? Well.. The problem with student finance in the UK is that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in their haste to modernize

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March 24, 2026 1 Comment

Ontario Status Quo Ante

Thursday morning, Ontario’s Minister of Colleges and Universities made a very big funding announcement: $6.4 billion in new funding over four years. It was certainly a welcome announcement, but as my analysis below shows, it’s not a magic cure by any means, and there is a big sting in the tail of the announcement for students. The fundamentals of the announcement are that the provincial government announced that it was going to provide universities and colleges with three big new

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February 17, 2026 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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