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Category: Student Aid

ECE Contributions vs. PSE Contributions

Morning all.  Today, HESA is releasing a paper called “What We Ask of Parents: Unequal Expectations for Parental Contributions to Early-Childhood and Post-Secondary Education in Canada”, by Jacqueline Lambert, Jonathan Williams, and me.  The gist of it is: “Holy cow, we ask parents to contribute a lot more to ECE than PSE – why is that?” You can click here to read the whole report, or you can see the short version as an op-ed in today’s Globe and Mail.  What I want to

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March 15, 2016 3 Comments

Guaranteed Annual Incomes: the Student Angle

One hot topic that seems to be on everyone’s social policy radar these days is the idea of a “basic income guarantee”, or a “mincome”, or a “guaranteed annual income” (GAI – the term I will use in this post).  A recently-announced pilot project in Finland got quite a bit of press; the federal Minister of  Families, Children and Social Development, Jean-Yves Duclos – who examined the idea thoroughly in his previous career as an economist at Laval – says the

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March 14, 2016 No Comments

The Coming Cost Debate in Ontario

Today I want to think about how the new Ontario system of student assistance is going to play out.  I think there is the potential here for quite an interesting and useful debate; but the timetable is somewhat tricky. As you will recall, the Government of Ontario is rolling out a plan to provide enough grants to fully offset tuition in most university and college programs for students from families with incomes of less than $50,000.  That’s going to happen

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March 8, 2016 1 Comment

What’s Next for Student Aid?

On the day of the Ontario budget, I half-sarcastically lamented on twitter that since the budget adopted so many good ideas that I (among others) had pushed over the years that, what was there left to write about? But having now had a few days to think about it, it’s occurred to me that there is still a lot of room left to innovate in student aid. So, herewith, the policy agenda for the next decade or so: 1) Nine

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March 7, 2016 No Comments

Income-Contingent Loans (Repaid Through the Tax System)

Every once in awhile, someone important says that what Canada/America really needs are income-contingent loans.  I usually reply, “we have income-contingent loans in Canada/America, that’s what the Repayment Assistance Program/Income Based Repayment program does”. To which the rejoinder is “no, no, that’s not income-contingent, what I mean by income-contingent is recovery of the loan is done automatically through the tax system, so you don’t run into all these messy issues around borrowers in repayment having not signed up for things”.

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March 3, 2016 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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