The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Student Aid

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

Read More »
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

Read More »
April 11, 2018 No Comments

Enough, Ontario

Our usual annual round-up of provincial budgets will come Wednesday, right after Saskatchewan posts its numbers, but as I was writing a draft of the piece I realized it makes almost no sense to talk about national trends in provincial funding without looking at what is going on in Ontario, because to a large extent it drives the national numbers.  And what is going on in Ontario – what has been going on in Ontario – over the past decade

Read More »
April 9, 2018 2 Comments

Supporting Students or Institutions?

Over the last few years I have noted a significant trend in provincial government spending across Canada, one which we termed “feed the student, starve the schools”.  Basically, governments are a lot happier giving money to the children of middle-class   voters  students than they are to universities and colleges because there are more votes there.  And besides, that way you can claim you’re doing something for access (even if the dollars are sometimes targeted inefficiently). Well, OK.  But access isn’t everything. 

Read More »
February 13, 2018 No Comments

Just Make it Automatic Already

The first budget of the rather short-lived Paul Martin administration introduced a fairly cool idea to Canadian policy: the Canada Learning Bond (CLB).  The idea built on some the then-trendy work of American sociologist Michael Sherraden (among others) around asset-based solutions to poverty.  Basically, the idea was that one of the reasons middle-class people act middle-class is that that they have a specific set of time-preferences; on the whole, working-class individuals tend to have shorter time-preferences and hence are less

Read More »
December 13, 2017 No Comments
Load More

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...