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Category: Student Aid

The Debt-Free Graduate Argument

No, I’m not talking about Murray Baker’s long-running franchise. I’m talking about the argument that having indebted graduates is a drag on the economy. It goes like this: indebted graduates consume less than debt-free graduates because they are repaying their loans. If they had fewer loans, they’d spend more money, with inevitable multiplier effects on the economy. Hence less student debt = more economic growth. (For an example of this thinking, see here). While this certainly sounds attractive, it ignores something important:

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November 20, 2012 1 Comment

The Tools to Plan

Governments are really keen on planning as a way to improve access to education. “If only people would plan more,” goes the refrain, “people would be able to explore more options, make better financial decisions, etc., etc.” True as far as it goes; so why are governments themselves the biggest culprits in impeding good financial planning? Say you’re a student in grade 12 deciding where to go to school next year. You’d probably like to know how your choice of

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November 14, 2012 No Comments

Henry David Thoreau on Need Assessment

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. Canada’s system of student aid need assessment is much too complicated. Not only do we have a ludicrous number of different tax rates, but we have all sorts of weird little measures to engineer micro-equity between students. The

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November 13, 2012 1 Comment

Student Aid Tax Rates

Anyone who thinks taxation is overly complicated and onerous in this country needs to spend a day or two in the shoes of a student. That’s because our tax system has absolutely nothing on our student aid assessment system. Student aid in Canada is distributed based on something called “assessed need”, which is defined as “assessed costs” minus “assessed resources” (not real costs or real resources, because those are subjective). Essentially, government has to ask students about their resources and

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November 12, 2012 1 Comment

Spousal Income

Over the past decade, successive Canadian governments have tried to give bigger and bigger breaks to parents through the student aid system. Loan eligibility has steadily been widened to richer and richer families by making expected parental contributions less onerous. But for some reason, no recent government has seen fit to change spousal contribution rates. Since the mid-1990s, this rate has been set at 80% of the spouse’s combined net income over a threshold which varies a bit by province

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November 7, 2012 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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