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Category: Student Aid

Student Debt by Ethnicity

Hi all. Just a quick one today, this time on some data I recently got from StatsCan. We know a fair a bit about student debt in Canada, especially with respect to distribution by gender, type of institution, province, etc. (Chapter 6 of The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada is just chock full of this kind of data if you’re minded to take a deeper dive). But to my knowledge no one has ever pulled and published the data

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January 27, 2025 No Comments

“Eating the Future” in Action

Y’all probably remember me talking about how Canada is eating the future by spending tons of money on consumption but not enough on real investments that pay dividends down the line. Today, I want to show you a prime example of that, and this: spending on the elderly. In every budget there is a line-item called “Elderly benefits” which includes Old Age Security (the non-contributory pension everyone over 65 gets) and the Guaranteed income Supplement (the means-tested income boost for

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November 13, 2024 4 Comments

A Sub-par Study on Returns to Education

Last Week, Royal Bank produced a study with the brash headline “Financial Returns After a Post-Secondary Education Have Diminished.” Within the limited terms of the limited methodology of the first half of the mini-paper, the headline is not entirely incorrect. But man, this is a disappointing piece of analysis from an organization with pretensions to thought leadership. So, what does this paper say? Basically, part 1 of the paper takes four data points for university (NOT all of post-secondary—strike one

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September 17, 2024 1 Comment

What if We Have Been Measuring Student Debt Wrong All Along?

I was just running the numbers on student debt in Ontario. They are interesting. Time used to be that the Provincial government published these numbers on its own. This Ontario open data set has data from 2003-04 to 2011-12. Since then, I have been filing FOI requests and the government have been providing identical basis. Figure 1 shows the results, according to the administrative data held by the Government of Ontario. Turns out that based on this data—which should be

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June 3, 2024 3 Comments

60 Years of a “National” Student Assistance Program

The Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP)—neé the Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP)—turns 60 years old this weekend. The story of how it came into being and how it still manages to function carries important lessons for the functioning of Canadian federalism, particularly when it comes to making “National Programs.” Education is, of course, a provincial responsibility. It’s part of the deal that made Confederation possible: Quebec could only consent to a national government with representation-by-population government if there a

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April 10, 2024 No Comments
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