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Category: Student Aid

Mobility Responsibilities

Saying that we should remove barriers to student mobility sounds like a motherhood issue.  But scratch a little deeper, and you’ll see that, in fact, Canadians are pretty equivocal on the concept. For starters, while everyone loves inbound mobility (come here!  It’s a great place!), there’s a pretty deep streak of protectionism in Canadian provincial governments on the issue of outbound mobility.  The sentiment of “let’s keep our kids at home” runs deep in many parts of the country.  It wasn’t until the advent

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April 28, 2014 2 Comments

The Implications of Net Zero Tuition

Over the past two days, I’ve been explaining how Canada spends as much on non-repayable aid as its PSE institutions collect in tuition fees for domestic students – meaning, in net terms, that Canadian students pay zero tuition.  Today I want to explore the implications of this. Let’s start with what it doesn’t mean: it doesn’t mean that many people are going to school for free.  All this funding is pretty lumpy. Many Quebecers and Newfoundlanders are receiving significantly more money

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April 23, 2014 2 Comments

Canadian Students Pay Net Zero Tuition

Yesterday, we noted that Canada hands out over $10 billion to its students each year.  Of that, $6.6. billion goes to students in the form of tax credits or grants; another $700 million is spent on savings incentives of various sorts.  All told,  over 70% of the $10 billion is non-repayable. How does that compare to what students spend on tuition?  Well, this isn’t entirely straightforward.  We know from CAUBO/Statscan statistics that in 2011-12, universities collected $7.37B in fees from students.  What

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April 22, 2014 4 Comments

Canada’s Annual Student Assistance Bill: $10 Billion, Most of it Non-Repayable

Let’s just count up all there is out there, shall we?  Just for fun. There’s loans, obviously.  In 2010-11, there was a little under $4 billion of those.  Of that, however, about half a billion was forgiven through loan remission, meaning  that “Net Loans” – was about $3.5 billion.  On top of that, there was about another $1.3 billion in up-front grants given out that year (roughly half from the feds, half from the provinces). (How do I know this,

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April 21, 2014 1 Comment

Happy Birthday, Canada Student Loans Program (Part the Last)

For the first thirty or so years of its existence, the CSLP changed little, and was rarely the subject of any political attention.  The annual loan maxima drifted gradually upwards from its initial $1,000 per year, but the only real innovations were the introduction of interest relief (the nucleus of today’s Repayment Assistance Program) in 1984, and a short-lived, ill-advised experiment in administrative cost-recovery in 1990 – during which the government levied a 3% fee on loans to pay for overhead,

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April 15, 2014 No Comments

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.

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