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Category: Student Aid

Costing Loans

One of the weirder sub-fields of student loan policy concerns how loans are accounted for in national budgets and statistics.  This sounds like an abstract consideration, but in fact it has the potential to drive student aid and access policy in some very unexpected directions.  (I know, I know, this may be my wonkiest post ever, and I may get one or two things wrong because I’m not an accounting expert, so bear with me). For a really good primer

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February 7, 2019 No Comments

Loans Work

If you spend any time looking at student aid research, you’ll be struck by how much empirical evidence there is on the effectiveness of grants (or, more broadly, “changes in net tuition”), and how little there is in terms of the effectiveness of loans.  Thus, one might be tempted to think that this means grants are effective and loans are not, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are a couple of reasons why it has been difficult

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February 6, 2019 No Comments

That Ontario Ancillary Fee Policy in Full

Last week, in the wake of the OSAP/Tuition announcements, I suggested that while most of the initial focus was on the changes to tuition fees and student aid, perhaps the more significant move was the announcement that many ancillary fees – specifically including student unions fees – were no longer to be mandatory and students had to be given the right to opt-out. But what does this mean, exactly?  It’s worth going through the details here because the statement is

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January 22, 2019 1 Comment

Ontario: Best-case/Worst-case Scenarios

You may have heard that there is a Conservative government in Ontario.  You may also have heard that it is, shall we say, keen on reducing government expenditures.  Further, you are aware that a provincial budget is traditionally delivered sometime between February and May.  So, naturally, you are asking yourself: what might the new government’s budget mean for post-secondary education?  What are the best-case and worst-case scenarios? I can’t claim much here in the way of inside information.  There are

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January 15, 2019 No Comments

That Ontario Auditor General Report

Last week, the Ontario Auditor General put out a report on the Ontario Student Assistance Program and more specifically the new Ontario Student Grants – you know, the ones that made the province’s Targeted Free Tuition program possible.  And while the media release that accompanied the report really reads as if it had been written by a partisan staffer (it is void of nuance), the report itself is pretty interesting, not least because it accomplishes what apparently OSAP was incapable of doing on its own:

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December 11, 2018 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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