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Category: Student Aid

Intriguing New Data on PSE Access

For reasons that continue to baffle me, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario keeps putting out quite fascinating research papers with almost no fanfare.  Seriously, reading their publications page is the literary equivalent of the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest.  Fabulous, fabulous stuff that somehow appears in conditions of near-absolute secrecy. The latest in the series of obscure diamonds is a piece written by the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation’s Reuben Ford, Taylor Shek-wai Hui

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November 7, 2019 1 Comment

2019 PSE Platforms – Liberal Party

The governing Liberal Party released its entire platform all at once on Sunday (the costing document is here), and there are a bunch of interesting things pertaining to PSE.  Let’s dig in. (For those of you looking for extra thoroughness, you may want to review my assessment of the Liberal record over the past four years first.  Finished?  Ok, onwards.) Without question, the most disappointing thing in the platform is the scientific research plank.  It consists of a $30 million commitment for pediatric cancer research

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October 2, 2019 No Comments

Does the Canada Student Loans Program Make Money?

Note: travel has limited writing time. In light of the NDP releasing their New Deal for People, it seemed a good time to re-run this post on the whether the federal government “profits” from the student loan program. Congrats and thanks to the NDP for releasing their platform early, but the claim that is “profiting from student debt” is highly suspect, especially since the 2019 budget reduced interest rates on the loans. You’ll remember a couple of weeks ago I

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June 17, 2019 No Comments

What Works in Reducing Inequality

A couple of weeks ago, the World Bank published a very interesting little paper which received little attention.  What Works to Reduce Inequalities in Higher Education?  A Systematic Review of the (Quasi-) Experimental Literature of Outreach and Financial Aid, by Koen Geven and Estelle Herbaut, needs to be read by everyone with an interest in expanding access to higher education.  While there have been many papers which have used meta-analysis techniques to look at financial aid programs, this paper extends those

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June 3, 2019 No Comments

That Augar Report

If you pay attention to UK higher education, you will know that yesterday the long-awaited Augar Report (technically, the Post-18 Review of Education and Funding: Independent Panel Report, but its usually named after its chair, Philip Augar).  It’s a big study – over 200 fairly densely-argued pages – and since I’ve spent the entire day in meetings in Washington DC I haven’t had the time to peruse the document closely and my commentary is based to a considerable degree on

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May 31, 2019 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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