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Category: Student Aid

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

Did CIBC Really Just Call for Lower Tuition?

Last week, HuffPost ran a story highlighting a newsletter from CIBC Economics about higher education.  It was actually a pretty meandering letter (CIBC Economics pieces on higher education are usually notable for their interesting use of data and somewhat shallow understanding of actual policy – here’s an earlier example).  The newsletter touched on a number of issues around educational supply and demand, but what HuffPost glommed on to was what a point about tuition in STEM programs and led with the headline “CIBC argues against

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September 5, 2017 No Comments

Free Tuition Developments

One major trend of the last couple of years in global higher education has been the arrival of a wave of “free tuition” policies in jurisdictions that formerly charged them and which – in some cases – have substantial private higher education sectors.  But announcing free tuition is one thing: actually pulling it off is another.  Let’s take a quick look-in at how things are playing out in various parts of the world. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte (Luzon’s

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August 31, 2017 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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