Category: Tuition

A Sub-par Study on Returns to Education

Last Week, Royal Bank produced a study with the brash headline “Financial Returns After a Post-Secondary Education Have Diminished.” Within the limited terms of the limited methodology of the first half of the mini-paper, the headline is not entirely incorrect. But man, this is a disappointing piece of analysis from an organization with pretensions to thought leadership. So, what does this paper say? Basically, part 1 of the paper takes four data points for university (NOT all of post-secondary—strike one

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Why Student Debt Might be About to Rise

One huge misconception about student debt is that it is mostly a function tuition fees, or the cost of living. But that’s only partly true. In fact, borrowing is a function of assessed need (that is, assessed costs minus assessed resources). And, in turn, assessed need is subject to maximums. Governments—at least, governments outside Quebec—don’t simply hand out whatever amount students need. Instead, they put maximums on total aid, which for reasons that defy easy explanation are expressed in weekly

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New Student Debt Numbers

Just a quick one today on student debt and why it hasn’t been increasing. So, under conditions of near-total secrecy, Statistics Canada last month published the results of its National Graduate Survey for the Class of 2020. One of the most awaited numbers in this survey are those relating to student debt. With so many folks always assuming that student debt is “skyrocketing,” it is always a good opportunity for myth correction. For you see: student debt is not skyrocketing.

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Curves and Formulas

Time for a quick economics lesson. Every class in a post-secondary institution has a cost curve.  It looks something like this: Once an instructor is assigned to a class, that class has a set cost to the university regardless of how many students enroll, shown above as the Cost Curve (CC).  It’s mainly a function of the instructor’s salary and materials costs, which are very low in lecture courses, higher in laboratory courses, and highest in clinical courses.  That CC

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Important But Not Worth It? Some Thoughts

Last month, my colleague Andrew Parkin at the Environics Institute published a fascinating little piece entitled Is Post-secondary Education is a Waste of Time?, which looks at Canadians’ evolving views on the worth of higher education (Andrew is a former Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, so we can safely infer that this is not an expression of his own feelings) Environics asked two questions: “these days, a young person in Canada can’t expect to get

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