Category: Student Aid

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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Hillary’s Higher Education Plans

Barring some sort of catastrophe, it now seems pretty clear that Hillary Clinton will be the 45th President of the United States.  There is a reasonable chance (51.6% in Monday’s FiveThirtyEight forecast) that the Democrats could regain the Senate and an outside chance that they could also regain the House.   Those odds probably change a bit in the Democrats’ favour once some post-grope polls come out later this week, but the basic outline of a post-November 7 world – Hillary

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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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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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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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