The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Student Aid

Osgoode’s Income-Contingent Experiment

There’s an interesting experiment developing at Osgoode law school involving the creation of (what is being called) an income-contingent loan system.  Dean Lorne Sossin outlines the plan a little bit in his blog, here.  There are some fairly big details missing from this description, for the quite good reason that the Dean is leaving a number of design features open, pending discussions with the faculty’s students.  But one crucial thing about this program is being obscured by the term “loan”:

Read More »
October 16, 2014 1 Comment

Do the Poor Really Pay More?

There’s a trope out there that goes something like this: “Loans are unfair because interest on the loans means that needy students pay more in total to go to school than students who don’t need a loan“.  If it were true, this would indeed be problematic.  But the thing is, for the most part, it’s not. Let’s follow two hypothetical students: Claudia and Eveline.  Claudia can manage to pay $25,000 for her four years of tuition, upfront; Eveline cannot, and

Read More »
October 7, 2014 4 Comments

Remembering the Axworthy Green Paper

It was 20 years ago today that then-Human Resources Minister Lloyd Axworthy presented the findings from his long-awaited “Green Paper” on social security to the House of Commons (the paper itself was released the day before, on October 5, 1994).  The back-drop:  Lucien Bouchard was leader of the opposition, Jacques Parizeau was the new Premier of Quebec, and we were on track for a referendum the following year.  Unemployment was over 10 percent; for youth, it was 20 percent.  Our

Read More »
October 6, 2014 No Comments

Ending the Merit Scholarship Arms Race

Here’s a way the new Ontario Minister of Training Colleges and Universities, Reza Moridi, could do everyone an enormous service, and win political capital at the same time: force institutions to cut back radically on automatic merit-based entrance scholarships. Here’s the background: at some point in the 1990s, Canadian institutions hooked onto the idea of giving out entrance awards as a way of managing enrolment.  It was a nice trick to help lock students in early in the admissions process

Read More »
September 25, 2014 4 Comments

The Problem at the Back End

Yesterday, we talked about how the Canadian aid system was both generous and clumsily organized, what with most of it being delivered through tax credits and loan remissions – neither of which shows up directly to reduce tuition at the time of registration.  This is something that needs to change; if we’re giving students so much money, we should at last give it to them in a form that is both useful and comprehensible.  So why can’t we do it? Our

Read More »
August 27, 2014 3 Comments
Load More

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...