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Category: Student Aid

A Great Day for Student Assistance

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

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February 26, 2016 7 Comments

Some Curious Student Loan Numbers

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

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February 17, 2016 1 Comment

Quick Takes on Student Aid Around the World

Three quick hits: Islamic Student Loans in the UK.  Loans and Muslim students are always a hot topic.  That’s partly because there are a number of Muslim students who don’t like the idea of loans with interest (not very many, but enough to be noticeable), and partly because certain soi-disant “progressive” white kids like to use Muslims’ reticence about interest as an excuse to argue that loans are effectively racist, and therefore should all be replaced by grants (yes, really). 

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November 20, 2015 No Comments

Explaining the #FeesMustFall Movement

One of the more interesting policy debacles in higher education this year has been the fracas over tuition fees in South Africa, which has led to what some are calling the biggest set of anti-government protests since the end of apartheid.  Here’s what you need to know: The protests began when universities announced fee hikes for the coming year.  On average, the fee hikes were in the 6% range, which was relatively modest given a persistent inflation rate of just

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November 12, 2015 No Comments

Expected Parental Contributions

Just a quick note: next week, I’ll be on that all-too-common transportation route, Toronto-Milwaukee-Shanghai, en route to attend (and deliver a paper at) the 6th International Conference on World-Class Universities, and the blog will be on hiatus while I’m away. Anyways, to business. Everyone knows that for dependent students – that is, students less than four years out of secondary school, or who have not spent two consecutive years in the labour market full-time – the amount of student assistance

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October 23, 2015 3 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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