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Category: Tuition

The Warren Proposal

No doubt everyone has heard about the ginormous ($1.25 trillion) promise that Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren made around post-secondary education last week.  But I suspect more people heard/saw the heat and noise about the promise rather than the promise itself.  So, herewith, a quick rundown and analysis: So, the first thing to note is that technically the package contained several policies.  The two major ones are about making tuition free in public schools, and a massive

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April 30, 2019 1 Comment

New Brunswick Brings the Stupid

Before we were rudely interrupted by the Ontario government doing something both interesting and mysterious on performance outcomes, I promised you all news out of New Brunswick. This matters to maybe fifteen of you, but you know, this blog is nothing if not faithful to geographically micro-targeting higher education nerds. So here we go. Recall that back under the Conservative government of Bernard Lord, the New Brunswick government introduced a titanically wasteful graduate tax rebate, which was a massive windfall

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April 16, 2019 No Comments

Strange, Inconsistent Arguments for Free Tuition

Every few weeks, it seems, someone shows up on twitter just aching to serve me some dubious justification for free tuition.   Let me recount two recent favourites. The first is the “oh but progressive taxation argument”.  It goes like this: Me: “You know universal subsidies for higher education are regressive, right?  On account of how the take-up rate for higher education – the likelihood of attending, the length of attendance, etc. – is positively correlated with family socio-economic status”?  (check back to

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March 12, 2019 3 Comments

Speak of the Devil

Yesterday was one of those days when I completely lucked out.  There I was, having just published a piece on possible scenarios on what the Ontario government might do in post-secondary education, when suddenly various news outlets began reporting that a new tuition framework was due to be announced later this week.  And it was a doozy: according to the report, the Conservative government was planning on reducing tuition in all regulated programs (ie. excluding international students and the graduate and

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January 16, 2019 3 Comments

How Not to Argue About Free Tuition (New Zealand Edition)

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about how Canada needs better data to improve understanding of what various types of intervention – like Alberta’s tuition freeze or Targeted Free Tuition in Ontario and New Brunswick –do in terms of access.  But data is not enough: it’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.  An example from our friends down in New Zealand can perhaps show why. We are coming up on the first anniversary of the implementation of free first-year

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November 29, 2018 No Comments
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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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