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Category: Student Aid

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

Free Election Manifesto Advice

OK, federal political parties.  I have some election manifesto advice for you.  And given that you’ve all basically accepted Tory budget projections and promised not to raise taxes, it’s perfect.  Completely budget neutral.  Here it is: Do Less. Seriously.  After 15 years of increasingly slapdash, haphazard policy-making in research and student aid, a Do Less agenda is exactly what we need. Go back to 1997: we had three granting councils in Canada.  Then we got the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. 

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February 12, 2015 3 Comments

Packaging Student Aid

One of the things about student aid that makes it such great fun as a policy area is that it’s as much about framing as it is about actual policy.  For instance, which of the following two policies would you like to have? a)      A policy where students are asked to bear a huge amount of debt – over $100,000 in some cases for an undergraduate degree – over 25 years, and where three-quarters of students will never repay

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January 13, 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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