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Category: Student Aid

The New York Times Swings and Misses

Sure signs of spring: baseball is back (and so is Vlad!), Ottawa is full of tulips, Quebec students are demonstrating in the buff and newspaper editors are turning their attention to student debt. Exhibit A: the Globe’s spread on debt last Saturday (full disclosure: HESA supplied some of the data the Globe published). Exhibit B: the cover of Sunday’s New York Times – “A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College.” Now, geeky wonks that we are, our first

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May 17, 2012 No Comments

Learning From Other Policy Areas: Housing

Sometimes, I think we spend too much time trying to learn from policy in other countries and not enough time learning from related policy areas in our own country. Take housing, for instance – probably higher education’s closest relative in policy terms. Choosing a home, like choosing an undergraduate degree, is a major decision with enormous financial implications, but both can be foreseen many years in advance, allowing people to plan for the purchase. Shelter and education are both considered

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May 16, 2012 1 Comment

A Closer Look at Student Debt (Postscript)

While the debt burden current students and recent graduates face may not be as difficult as aggregate student debt levels might suggest, there’s one final point worth making about student debt in Canada. As we reported, student debt levels in the 2000s increased somewhat, but not as much as you might have thought. Notably, university debt didn’t keep pace with increases in tuition, likely owing to significant federal and provincial investments in student grant programs. Yet averages tend to obscure

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April 20, 2012 2 Comments

A Closer Look at Student Debt (Part 3)

As we saw yesterday, while student debt at graduation has been increasing, falling interest rates have meant that monthly student debt payments have made up a smaller share of a graduate’s income in recent years. Of course means and medians only tell part of the story. While it may be true that the average borrower was better off in 2007 than in 2002 despite graduating with more debt, the same can’t be said for every borrower. As Figure 1 points

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April 17, 2012 4 Comments

A Closer Look at Student Debt (Part 2)

On Friday, we looked at the evolution of average monthly student loan payments since the 1980s. Though debt has increased considerably during the past thirty years, it’s been pretty stable over the last decade.  Meanwhile, a major decline in interest rates has caused student loan payments to drop from a peak of $323 per month in 2000 to $268 in 2011 at the Bachelor’s degree level (in inflation-adjusted dollars). If student debt is up but the monthly payment burden is down, are students

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April 16, 2012 2 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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