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Category: Student Aid

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

Fifteen Years Ago Today…

Jean Chrétien rose in the House of Commons to present his reply to the Speech from the Throne. About half-way in, he noted casually that there would likely be a financial surplus that year (a miracle, considering where we’d been in 1995). And he was planning to blow it on something called “Millennium Scholarships.” Until that exact moment, his caucus had been in the dark about the idea. Indeed, cabinet had been in the dark until the day before. So,

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September 24, 2012 No Comments

Student Aid Ineligibility

Here’s a little-known fact: some Canadians graduating from high school can’t get student loans, even though they have been accepted to a post-secondary institution and have financial need. It’s not because they have a bad credit history, or anything like that: it’s simply because they live in the wrong place. Here’s why. The Canada Student Loans Program is really only half a program; by design, it sits side-by-side a number of provincial programs. This means that before you can even

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September 14, 2012 3 Comments

Student Aid through the Looking Glass

On the heels of Statistics Canada’s annual overview of tuition fee increases across the country (which unfortunately fails to take into account Pauline Marois’s imminen cancellation of the $254 tuition hike in Quebec), it’s worth considering something that everyone involved in student aid policy needs to come to grips with: that there is a significant fraction of student aid recipients who are better off when tuition rises, and worse off when tuition falls. I’m not making this up. Here’s how it happens:

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September 13, 2012 1 Comment
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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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