Category: Student Aid

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

Read More »

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

Read More »

A Closer Look at Student Debt (Part 1)

A few months ago, we reported that increases in student debt in the 2000s did not keep up with tuition, owing largely to increases in student grant and bursary programs. Yet the raw amount of student debt at graduation tells only part of the story. Thinking about debt in terms of balance owing can obscure more than it reveals; it’s also worth looking at debt from the lens of monthly student loan payments. Given student loans’ fixed repayment period, monthly

Read More »

How to Fix the Canada Learning Bond

Chances are you’re familiar with Registered Education Savings Plans. Though they’ve been around for 40 years now, it was only with the 1998 budget’s introduction of the Canada Education Savings Grants and their 20% top-ups of RESP contributions that they got big. Nowadays, parents contribute $3.39 billion per year to RESPs, and the CESG program hands out $667.1 million per year. Of course, people pointed out at the time that the CESGs offered much more to families that could afford to

Read More »

Tuition Fees Worldwide

Today, HESA released the annual global year in review of tuition fees and student aid for 2011, which you can read here. Put together by HESA’s network of over thirty associates around the world, myself and (mainly) Pamela Marcucci, it’s the first really global analysis of how cost-sharing is evolving around the world. We looked at what we call the “G-40”; that is, the 40 countries which collectively comprise 90% of the world’s students and 90% of the world’s scientific

Read More »