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Category: Tuition

The Minimum Wage Shtick

One little rhetorical trick you sometimes see anti-tuition types using is a comparison between tuition and minimum wage.  Last year for instance, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative put out a piece saying that working at minimum wage (which is in fact relatively rare for students, who typically earn about 25% more than minimum wage), students today have to work more than twice as much as students thirty years ago in order to pay tuition.  What should we make of

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April 29, 2015 4 Comments

De-Regulating Tuition in Nova Scotia

There seems to be a lot of interest in this Nova Scotia budget announcement on tuition-fee de-regulation, mostly from the everything-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket crowd.  In the interests of trying to keep people’s eyes on the ball, I thought I would try to put this move into some kind of context and examine what the likely outcomes will be. (Necessary conflict of interest statement: In fall 2014, I did some writing work for the Nova Scotia Council of University Presidents, relating to priorities

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April 16, 2015 No Comments

Australian Deregulation (Again) and the Future of Tuition Fees

So deregulation in Australia now looks to be dead and buried.  But in its death throes, the debate finally coughed-up some interesting ideas about how to pay for higher education.  Here’s the re-cap: Not long after my last article on this subject, the coalition decided to put a second deregulation bill to a vote in the Senate.  The first bill failed by two votes.  The second one, after months of lobbying and arm-twisting, failed by four.  This suggests a couple of

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April 9, 2015 No Comments

College Tuition 2014-15

Statistics Canada, for reasons best known to itself, only tracks tuition for university programs.  For college programs, we’re basically in the dark.  We’ve got nothing, nada, zip. In theory, it’s not all that difficult to work out.  All you need to know is price and enrolment for each program offered: sum the prices, divide by enrolment, and voila!  Average tuition.  And yet nobody does it (my guess for why Statscan doesn’t do it?  Something less than full confidence in the enrolment data

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April 6, 2015 8 Comments

Lowering Tuition in the UK

So, the UK Labour Party has decided that if it gets elected this spring (odds: probably just less than even), it will bring tuition fees down from their current maximum of £9,000/year to a maximum of £6,000/year. Progressive, right?  Not in a million years. As I pointed out back here, the weirdness of the UK system of fees and income contingent loans is that fees have risen so high that very few people – about one in five – are expected

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March 3, 2015 1 Comment
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