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Category: Student Aid

Does Student Debt Matter If You’re Not Going to Pay It Back?

You can accumulate one hell of a lot of debt these days in the UK.  Just in an undergraduate degree, fees are ‎£9,000 per year plus you can get another ‎£10,702 in maintenance loans per year of you’re studying in London.  Over a three-year degree that’s ‎£59,106 or a tad over $100,000 (yes, really). So, at face value one can understand the spate of stories coming out of the UK these days talking about how their massive debt loads are

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December 9, 2016 1 Comment

Important Changes to Canada Student Loans

The last federal budget made one large signal improvement to student assistance: the abolition of the education tax credit, and the re-investment of that money into an improved Canada Student Grant. Less remarked upon was a promise to simplify need assessment. Now the details of that effort are emerging, and they are pretty interesting. The change has to do with the student contribution rules. In the Canadian student aid system, various forms of student income and assets are considered “resources”

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December 1, 2016 8 Comments

Comparing International Student Loan Repayment Plans

People talk a lot about student debt and the burden it places on recent graduates.  Not surprisingly, different countries come to different policy conclusions about how this burden should be dealt with.  Today’s column examines how various countries choose to deal with this issue. What I am going to do today is compare expected loan repayments under five different student loan regimes: Canada, the US, the UK, Australian and New Zealand.  This obviously does not fully examine the issue of

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November 30, 2016 1 Comment

Student Living Standards

Last month, a group called Meal Exchange, an inter-university student anti-hunger group, in collaboration with the Ryerson School of Social Work, published an interesting paper called Hungry for Knowledge: Assessing the Prevalence of Student Food Insecurity on Five Canadian Campuses.  People are mostly drawing the wrong conclusions from it, but it’s worth examining nonetheless. Meal Exchange surveyed 4500 students at five campus across Canada using a battery of questions on food purchase & consumption identical to those used in Statistics

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November 7, 2016 No Comments

The Yale Tuition Postponement Option

If you pay attention to student assistance, you know about income-contingent loans.  And if you’ve heard about income-contingent loans, you probably know that the first national scheme debuted in Australia back in the late 1980s.  You might even know that the first theoretical exploration of income-contingent loans was made by Milton Friedman back in the 1950s (actually, he was talking more about human-capital contracts, but close enough.  And you might occasionally wonder: why did it take 30 years to go

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October 19, 2016 1 Comment
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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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