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Category: Student Aid

The 2016 Presidential Race

I’ve been spending a bit of time in the United States the last couple of weeks (Indianapolis, Boston, Washington DC), and one of the things I’m noticing is the extent to which political discourse – which, ludicrously, already centers around the 2016 Presidential Race – is focussed on issues in higher education.  Specifically: issues of tuition and student debt. This is interesting for a couple of reasons.  First of all, it’s an enormous shift from about ten years ago, when

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May 28, 2015 No Comments

Worst Set of Provincial Budgets This Century

It’s the first week of May, and at HESA Towers that means it’s provincial budget analysis time.  As of now, nine of ten provinces have submitted budgets.  Sure, PEI is missing, and Alberta is presumably going to have to re-do its budget once the election’s over, but neither of them is likely to have a budget before June, so now’s as good a time as any. (Islanders feeling slighted may rest assured they are not being singled out.  Our policy

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May 4, 2015 No Comments

Trust, Transparency, and Need-Based Aid

If you look around the world at the kinds of subsidies made available to students, you’ll be struck by the fact that there are two very large chunks of the world where need-based aid isn’t the dominant form: post-Socialist Europe and Africa.  The reasons for this boil down to a simple issue: trust. In the post-socialist countries, the preference for merit-based aid over need-based aid is a relatively recent affair.  Prior to 1990, access to university was restricted both in

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April 28, 2015 No Comments

A Fascinating Student Aid Experiment

One incredibly cool thing about this week’s budget is that it creates a policy experiment that may settle some age-old questions about financial barriers to education.  I speak of course of the abolition of the in-study income clawback. When people talk about “financial barriers” to education, they are usually conflating two separate phenomena.  The first has to do with return on investment: if prices rise too high, students will say they are not interested because it’s more money than it’s worth. 

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April 24, 2015 2 Comments

Lowering Tuition in the UK

So, the UK Labour Party has decided that if it gets elected this spring (odds: probably just less than even), it will bring tuition fees down from their current maximum of £9,000/year to a maximum of £6,000/year. Progressive, right?  Not in a million years. As I pointed out back here, the weirdness of the UK system of fees and income contingent loans is that fees have risen so high that very few people – about one in five – are expected

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March 3, 2015 1 Comment
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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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