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Category: Student Aid

Emergency Benefit Puzzles

Last week, Statistics Canada published a fascinating little report on how much assistance Canadian students received from the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB) during COVID.  The results are interesting but lack a bit of context, which I thought I would provide. It’s been nearly three years since CERB and CESB were a thing, so here’s a refresher:  CERB was announced on March 25 just a few days after much of the economy came

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January 20, 2023 No Comments

The Affordability of Canadian Universities, 2020, Part 2

Ok, so I got a little bit too excited in yesterday’s blog, when I indicated I could show how the increase in student aid spending since 2006 has improved affordability.  I forgot that while I do have aggregate data on grant expenditures across the country, data on how this money is split by institutional type is pretty scarce.  The Canada and Quebec student aid programs do publish data like this, but for some reason neither government chooses to leave older

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November 9, 2022 No Comments

Canada’s New and Wasteful Student Loan Interest Policy

In the Fall Economic Statement last Thursday, Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the government will eliminate student loan interest not just on loans going forward, but also retroactively. This was not out of the blue – the government promised this in the last election.  It remains, however, a disastrous idea.  Hundreds of millions of dollars a year for no real net benefit (at least in the field of education).  I have already laid out why this is a

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November 7, 2022 No Comments

Quebec Election Manifestos 2022

Quebec goes to the polls next Monday, and while I do election manifesto analysis for all provinces, the one for Quebec is a bit extra special, both because of the sheer number of parties and because Quebec’s one of the few places in the country where we have seen consistent increases in investment, even if the current government does have some funny ideas about things like “academic freedom”.  In reverse order of current polling results: Parti québécois.  Remember when they

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September 29, 2022 No Comments

The Long Strange History of Loan Remission Policies

One thing that long marked Canada out as an oddball amongst nations in higher education policy is the reliance of its student aid systems on something called “loan remission”.  A series of recent policy moves has nearly eradicated the use of this policy tool. Loan remission is pretty simple.  Students take out a loan at the start of a year of studies and then before repayment begins some of it gets written off.  Sometimes it’s done annually, sometimes it’s done

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September 8, 2022 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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