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
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”.
You would be forgiven, over the past 24 months or so, for growing ever more confused about when tuition is “free” and when it is not. The reason, in part, is that “free” tuition is in the eye of the beholder. You’d think it would be as easy as saying “no fees”, but it’s actually not that simple. What if, instead of a fee, there is a variable “contribution” or a gradate tax? What if fees are charged to a
I was going to stay off the blog this whole week (I need a reading week, too!), but there was a budget in Ontario yesterday. A weird and wonderful (if somewhat under-documented) budget, which is going to change the way we think about student aid, tuition, and affordability in Canada for decades to come. Here are the basics: all of Ontario’s different grants and loan remission programs are being merged together into one big up-front grant program (all the provincial
Every once in awhile, it’s good to go searching through statistical abstracts just to see if the patterns you take for granted can still be taken for granted. So I recently went hunting through some CSLP annual reports and statistical abstracts to see what I could find. And I’m glad I did, because there are some really surprising numbers in the data. So here’s the really big take-away: the number of students borrowing from the Canada Student Loan Program rose from 365,363
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.
