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Category: Tuition

What Students Really Pay

In a couple of weeks, Statistics Canada will publish its annual Tuition and Living Accommodation Cost (TLAC) survey, which is an annual excuse to allow the usual suspects to complain about tuition fees.  But sticker price is only part of the equation: while governments and institutions ask students to pay for part of the educational costs, they also find ways to lessen the burden through subsidies like grants, loan remission, and tax expenditures.  And Statscan never bothers to count that

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August 26, 2014 4 Comments

Back to School 2014

Morning, all.  Ready for the new school year run-down? One thing already clear is that pretty much the whole sector has finally come to grips with the reality that annual 4% increases in funding aren’t coming back any time soon. That’s causing institutions to think more strategically than they’ve had to in a long time, which is a Good Thing – the downside is that there appears to be some places where this hard thinking is leading to some fairly

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August 25, 2014 No Comments

The Effects of Tuition Fees (Part 2)

As I mentioned last week, a major paper I’ve been working on for over a year with colleagues from DZHW on the subject of the effects of fees was published last Monday by the EC (available here).  In my last post, I talked about how fees affected institutions – today, I want to talk about how they affect students. In our report, we looked at case studies over 15 years (1995-2010) from nine countries – Austria, Canada, England, Finland, Germany,

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June 30, 2014 1 Comment

The Effects of Tuition Fees (Part 1)

For the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been working on a project with colleagues Dominic Orr and Johannes Wespel of the Deutsche Zentrum für Hochschul- und Wissenschaftsforschung (DZHW) for the European Commission, looking at the effects of changes in tuition fees and fee policies on institutions and students.  The Commission published the results on Friday, and I want to tell you a little bit about them – this week I’ll be telling you about the effects on institutions, and next week I’ll summarize

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June 23, 2014 3 Comments

Tuition Fees and Inequality

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: it’s unfair that some people graduate with debt, and others don’t.  The ones that do tend to have started off poorer to begin with.  And so instead of being a means of social mobility, tuition ends up being a means of perpetuating it – the ones who start off poorer end up poorer.  That’s bad, and that’s why we should have no tuition.  Eliminate tuition and you eliminate inequality. Let’s take this

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May 26, 2014 2 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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