Category: Student Aid

British Columbia in A Nutshell

Morning everyone.  You know the drill by now, since we’ve already done this for Nova Scotia and Alberta.   So, let’s get going. Let’s start with student numbers.  British Columbia is very much like Alberta in the sense that it used to be a province where college students outnumbered university students until several institutions switched from being colleges to universities and everything switched.  In BC, we see this in 2008-09, which is when Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver

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Alberta in a Nutshell

A couple of weeks ago, I told you I’d be doing statistical portraits of various provinces over the next few weeks.  I started with Nova Scotia (where I spent some great days at the CICan national conference and seeing folks at various Halifax universities, and incidentally, congratulations to Joël Dickinson on her new appointment as President at Mount Saint Vincent University), and then asked for some advice about which province to do next.  The response was overwhelming: you wanted to

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Inflation

One of the less-anticipated outcomes of the COVID pandemic is the return of inflation at levels not seen in nearly thirty years.  It is not yet clear if this inflation is something transitory, or something more long-term.  The supply-chain snarls of mid-2021 have been followed by inflationary spikes due to rising oil prices and now – with the invasion of Ukraine – major spikes in food prices world-wide.  In theory, each of these things is a one-off.  But as wages

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Student Financial Aid Regimes

By Alex Usher and Jonathan Williams Last week, we presented you with an overview of tuition fee regimes around the world.  Not unreasonably, a few of you asked “what about student aid?  Doesn’t that matter?”.  Of course it does!  And we have you covered. So first of all, let’s talk about what we mean by student aid.  Broadly speaking, it comes in three forms: loans, grants, and “indirect aid”.  Loans are simple enough.  Grants are trickier, because while they usually

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The Twelve Student Aid Programs That Matter

One of the challenges of trying to do large-scale global comparative higher education work is focusing.  It’s a big world out there – and there are so many interesting variations and models that you just want to get your hands on everything.  But at some point, you must choose a few things in order to make sense of the bigger patterns. So it is with student financial assistance.  There are aid programs in a lot of countries, many with some

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