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Category: Student Aid

The Ontario NDP’s Bad Student Loan Math

The Ontario NDP have started down the road to madness on student aid.  Someone needs to stop them. Here’s the issue: the NDP have decided to promise to make all Ontario student loans interest-free.  As a policy, this is pretty meh.  It’s not the kind of policy that increases participation because students don’t really pay attention to loan interest, and it’s not going to make loans a whole lot more affordable because Ontario forgives most loans anyway (as a consequence something

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September 29, 2016 No Comments

Reforming Funding for First Nations Students

I see from this article by John Ivison of the National Post that the issue of funding for post-secondary education for First Nations is becoming a bit of a hot potato.  Time for us to take a look at the situation. I think most people now get that First Nations’ students don’t receive “free education”.  They pay tuition fees like everyone else.  What they do have (if they have “status”) is a parallel student aid system, which is called the

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September 26, 2016 No Comments

Ontario’s Quiet Revolution

Last year, the Government of Ontario announced it was moving to a new and more generous systems of student grants.  Partly, that was piggybacking on a new and enhanced federal grants and partly it was converting its own massive system of loan forgiveness and tax credits into a system which – more sensibly – delivered them upfront to students.  For most students from low-income backgrounds, this means they will receive more in grants than they pay in tuition. Now, while

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August 10, 2016 2 Comments

Affordability of Higher Education in Canada and the United States

About a decade ago, my colleague Kim Steele and I did a comparison of the affordability of public higher education in all ten Canadian provinces and fifty US states. In general, Canadian provinces did not do well; yes, Canada has lower costs for students, but its student aid system is less generous and – this is worth remembering – Americans are wealthier than we are. And so, once you adjust costs and net costs for family purchasing power, it turned

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June 14, 2016 1 Comment

The New-Brunswick Step-Function

So there’s a kerfuffle going on in New Brunswick about the government’s new “tuition-free” policy for students from families with under $60K in income which I mentioned in passing a couple of weeks ago.  Basically, the problem is that the government drew up the program hurriedly, on the back of an envelope, and didn’t think through the consequences. If you just listen to the launch announcements, the new New Brunswick program is similar to the new Ontario program (which you

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May 16, 2016 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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