Category: Student Aid

Financial Illiteracy

Last week I joined researchers, policymakers and innovative practitioners at the HEQCO Fear of Finance: Financial Literacy and Planning for Post-Secondary Education conference. Kudos to the HEQCO team for putting on a fantastically relevant conference that brought these diverse groups together; it doesn’t happen very often, and it was engaging for participants step out of our usual silos for a couple of days. I presented on what I call financial aid literacy in PSE; that is, what students and their parents

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The Central Canadian Jock Windfall

The other day I was flipping through public policy maven Charles Clotfelter’s new book Big Time Sports in American Universities (you can get the gist via this interview on YouTube). It reminded me to check up a bit on a subject which intrigued me a few years ago, namely the evolution of sports scholarships in Canadian universities. Fifteen years ago, Canadian athletic scholarships were still both small and rare: even in 2001-02, CIS schools were distributing just $3.4 million in scholarships

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Interest on Student Loans – Time to Go Dutch

News out of the U.S. suggests that one possible casualty of that country’s budget crisis is the in-school interest subsidy on student loans. Since Canadian governments almost always end up copying the Americans on student aid eventually (see: income-based grants, rules on institutional designation, workforce-related loan forgiveness, etc.), this seems like a good time for Canada to review its own policies on student loan interest. Some countries, like Germany and many developing countries, charge no interest at all on student

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