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Category: Student Aid

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

Student Loans and Income Tax Systems

Last week, I blogged about my disappointment with the Throne Speech.  However, I left out one really promising thing; namely, the idea that it would make possible free, automatic tax filing for simple returns to ensure citizens receive the benefits they need.  This is good, but in some ways insufficiently ambitions.  They should go further and fully modernize the system to make possible the collection of loans through the income tax system and thus make possible a more fully income-contingent loan

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October 5, 2020 3 Comments

New Student Aid Data

Canada is – to put it mildly – flat-out terrible at releasing student aid data.  How many loans are issued?  How many grants?  In what amounts?  These rather basic facts are unknowable from the public record.  The government of Canada publishes statistics on the Canada Student Loans Program, which is good except that a) that’s only about 40% of the system and b) the most recent publication is from – and I wish I were kidding about this – 2016-17. 

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September 2, 2020 1 Comment

Coronavirus (20) – So, that Student Support Package

If there is one thing that unites the higher education community right now, it is the fact that we are all so, so, tired.  One thing after another.  And yesterday, just as I was thinking about what nice non-coronavirus story I could tell you, the feds dropped a $9 billion program to support students through COVID.  So naturally, this here is your explainer. The comms on this are a bit of a mess, but basically, this initiative has four pillars,

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April 23, 2020 7 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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