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Category: Student Aid

Two Ways of Thinking About Student Aid and Equity

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Take two students.  One of them comes from a poor family and needs student aid, the other, by dint of having wealthier parents, is either ineligible for aid, or can manage somehow to get through school without it.  One therefore finishes school with debt and the other does not.  Because the debt carries interest, the poor student pays “more” than the better-off student.  And because the poorer student will start their career

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June 11, 2018 2 Comments

Financial Barriers

Following on from yesterday’s blog about Human Capital Theory, I thought it would be worth talking a little more broadly about financial barriers to higher education and what we mean by that term.  Because there are at least three different phenomena at work, and much too much policy confuses the three. The first type of possible financial barrier is the one we encountered yesterday: the “value for money” barrier, (or alternatively, the “is it worth it” barrier).   A free master’s

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May 10, 2018 No Comments

An Excellent Idea

Good news!  There is now a litmus test in Ontario to see which interest groups and/or political parties – if any – actually care about expanding access to post-secondary education and which just prefer grandstanding about tuition and/or student aid.  And that test is whether or not anyone will bother to endorse the recommendations put forward by Carleton’s Jennifer Robson in her paper Post-Secondary Access: Better Life Chances for Ontario’s Children, published last week by U of T’s School of Public

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April 30, 2018 1 Comment

Five Approaches to Subsidizing Students

Specialists sometimes like to talk as if post-secondary funding is some kind of arcane science.  But if you cut to the chase, it’s actually pretty simple.  You can tinker around the edges, and you can use different techniques to fund different parts of the system, but fundamentally there are only these five approaches: Subsidize nothing.  Some education is private and does not attract any subsidy.  In fact, in large swathes of Asia, Africa and Latin America (not to mention about

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April 12, 2018 1 Comment

Lo! More Mediocre Provincial Budgets

The Government of Saskatchewan delivered its budget yesterday which means that all ten provinces are now in – much earlier than usual (there’s usually one irritating May holdout).  And guess what?  It’s another year of (on aggregate at least) barely keeping up with inflation! Figure 1 shows changes in budgeted year-on-year transfers to institutions, in constant dollars.  The national increase is 0.4%, with a big gain in Quebec offsetting a small decrease in Ontario and a larger one in Alberta

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April 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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