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Category: Student Aid

Independence Day

When should a student be considered independent of his or her parents for the purpose of calculating student assistance?  It’s a tricky question, which generates different answers in different parts of the world. Most student loan schemes require some kind of test of parental income for at least some of their clients.  In some places, it’s a way to save money – there isn’t enough to go around, so let’s prioritize the less well-off.  In other places (including Canada), it’s

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November 20, 2014 No Comments

Affordability

If I could ban one word from higher education discussions, it’s “affordability”.  It’s a word without precision, and, particularly when used as a synonym for “accessibility”, it’s downright misleading and harmful. The worst is when someone uses the raw price of a good – in this case tuition – to indicate “affordability”; as in: “tuition went up 5% last year, and that makes it less affordable”.  This is simply asinine.  When the price of milk or gas goes up, we

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November 17, 2014 3 Comments

Three Rules for Politicos

So I see that the Government of Ontario has announced what is possibly the most boutique student aid program of all time.  If students volunteer at the 2014-15 PanAm Games, they will be exempted from the pre-study period contribution (a contribution from the money you earn up to 16 weeks prior to the start of your studies) for 2015-16, and will be get a 12-month grace period on their loans (instead of 6-month) before needing to start repayment. <puts computer

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November 10, 2014 No Comments

Yet More Reasons Free Tuition is a Bad Idea

The easy case to be made against free tuition is that it benefits students from richer backgrounds.  That’s because they are more numerous in higher education than students from poorer backgrounds and so, on aggregate, would receive more aid.  But that misses a more important point: because of the interaction between student aid and tuition, students from wealthier backgrounds would also receive a bigger benefit on an individual level. Let’s take a really simple example from Ontario.  Take two students, Adele and

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November 4, 2014 1 Comment

Cost of Attendance

You may recall that we recently put out a paper looking at “net prices” in Canadian higher education, which concluded that, in many cases, these prices were substantially lower than is commonly believed, and that too many of our subsidies in higher education were effectively hidden from those who benefit from them.  The reaction for the most part was amusingly incoherent – mostly variations on “they must be lying, because I’ve never heard of these hidden subsidies”. But there was

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October 29, 2014 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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