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Category: Student Aid

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. 

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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

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December 13, 2017 No Comments

Student Loan Interest Rate Policy

One student aid policy debate that pops up periodically around the world – most recently in the United Kingdom – is the question of interest rates.  On the one hand, you have people who use a slightly medieval line of thought to claim that any interest on loans is a form of “profit” and hence verboten where students are concerned.  On the other side, you have people who note that loan interest subsidies by definition only help people who have already “made it” to

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November 6, 2017 1 Comment

Notes on Medieval Higher Education Finance

No Ving Rhames/Pulp Fiction jokes (you were thinking it, you know you were).  Just a couple of interesting tales from about the high middle ages to show that in fact there is almost no tale under the sun in higher education which isn’t seven or eight centuries old. Student loans.  Though the tradition of providing aid to worthy but needy students as a gift (i.e. bursaries) has a history almost as old as universities themselves, the concept of lending money to

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September 29, 2017 No Comments

Twenty Years Ago Sunday

Five years ago I wrote the following blog, under the headline “fifteen years ago today”.  I think it’s worth running again (with a couple of minor alterations). On September 24th, 1997, Jean Chrétien rose in the House of Commons to present his reply to the Speech from the Throne. About half-way in, he noted casually that there would likely be a financial surplus that year (a miracle, considering where we’d been in 1995). And he was planning to blow it

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September 22, 2017 2 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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