Category: Student Aid

US Debt Cancellation – What Just Happened?

So, the big news last week in world higher education was the Biden administration finally cancelling some student debt and – in theory, who knows? – resuming student loan repayments in December of this year (they were suspended in the Spring of 2020 in the chaos of early COVID.) Let’s break down Wednesday’s announcement. The government forgave the following debt: Up to $20,000 of Department of Education debt for borrowers who apply and meet the following three criteria: have outstanding

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America’s Student Debt Cancellation Morass

It has now been something on the order of 26 months since anyone in the United States has been required to make payments their student loans.  As in Canada, these payments were suspended at the outset of the pandemic.  But whereas in Canada repayments re-started after about six months (Oct 1, 2020), in the United States they have yet to do so.  Understanding why gets us all a little closer to understanding the disfunction that is the American Higher Education

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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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