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Category: Student Aid

Provincial Budgets 2017

Springtime brings with it two certainties: 1) massive, irritating weekend traffic jams in Toronto as the city grants permits to close down Yonge street for a parade to virtually any group of yahoos, thus making it impossible to go from the cities east to west ends and 2) provincial budgets.  And with that, it’s time for my annual roundup of provincial budgets (click on the year for previous analyses – 2016 2015 2014 2013.  It’s not as bad as last year but it’s still

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May 15, 2017 No Comments

What’s Next for Student Aid

A few months ago, someone asked me what I wanted to see in the budget.  I said i) investment in aboriginal PSE, ii) system changes for the benefit of mature students and iii) changes to loan repayment (specifically, a reduction of the maximum loan payment from 20%  of disposable income to 15%).  To my great pleasure, the government came through on two of those wishes.  But there is still a lot of work to do yet. Let’s start with the Post-Secondary

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March 30, 2017 1 Comment

Bravo, New Brunswick

Readers may remember that about this time last year, I was giving the Government of New Brunswick a bit of stick for a botched student aid roll-out. Today I am pleased to give credit where it is due, and congratulate the folks in Fredericton for fixing the problem and developing a much better student aid system. Let’s go back 12 months to pick up the story.  In February 2016, the Ontario government had come up with a fabulous new system which

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March 2, 2017 No Comments

Manitoba’s Golden Opportunity

It’s tough to be in government these days: prolonged slow growth means it’s difficult to keep increasing spending at a rate at which citizens have become accustomed.  Instead, with rising costs and little appetite to raise taxes or fees, governing often seems to be one long exercise in nickel-and-diming.  Higher education – in most of Canada at least – has felt some of this, but in truth has been insulated more than most other parts of the public service. But

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February 2, 2017 5 Comments

American Higher Education Under Trump

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States (actually, the 44th person to be President: Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms screw up the count).  What does this mean for higher education? First off, let’s recollect that where higher education is concerned, the US, like Canada, is a federation where the main decisions about funding public education are made at the state level. Decreased state investment in institutions and consequent rises in tuition have

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January 19, 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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