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Category: Student Aid

That Alberta PSE Strategy (Finally)

Last Thursday, the Government of Alberta finally released the long-awaited Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs strategy, optimistically subtitled “a 10-year strategy for post-secondary education”.   So, after all the hullaballoo of the last year or so, what does it all mean for the province’s universities and colleges? Let’s get the process stuff out of the way first.   The province did kind of publish some of the background research McKinsey did for $3.5M.  It’s incorporated in this 217-page power point (no, I am not kidding).  Conceivably, this

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May 3, 2021 1 Comment

That NDP Student Debt Forgiveness Promise

Today, I want to look at Jagmeet Singh’s recent promise that an NDP government would forgive up to $20,000 in federal student debt.  It was a fascinating little announcement, which is part-super-savvy and part deeply-perplexing. The announcement itself, which you can read in the NDP press release here,  says that an NDP government would i) eliminate interest on student loans because interest = profit, ii) bring in a 5-year waiting period before student loans became repayable and iii) forgive the first $20,000

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April 7, 2021 2 Comments

The US Student Debt Cancellation Debate

If you follow US policy debates at all, you will probably over the last couple of years have noticed that the idea of student debt cancellation has become a totem of the progressive left.  With the election of Joe Biden two weeks ago (and again this week, after several recounts) this issue is coming centre-stage, with some kind of executive order on the matter being seen potentially as an “early win” for the new administration.  Below, I answer some of

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November 19, 2020 No Comments

Why is the NDP so Bad on Student Aid?

Here’s a thing which has puzzled me for pretty much the entirety of my adult life: why is it that the New Democratic Party – in theory the party most likely to defend the marginalized – can’t come up with decent student aid policies?  Why is it that at every turn, they choose to embrace the policies that are the least equitable and effective? (Major caveat: I exempt the BC New Democrats from this analysis, because they mostly have their

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November 12, 2020 2 Comments

New Student Debt Data

Over the summer, Statistics Canada did a data dump on student debt from the 2015 National Graduate Survey.  I haven’t really had a chance to dive into it until now, but here’s a quick round-up. Let’s start with the proportion of students who are borrowing (see Figure 1).  Rates of borrowing vary quite a bit by level of education: lowest at the doctoral level and highest in professional programs such as law and medicine.  Neither is surprising: professional programs have

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November 5, 2020 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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