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Category: Tuition

Why Public Higher Education Should be Free…

… is the unfortunate title of a new book by Robert Samuels, a professor at the University of California, and president of the University Council – American Federation of Teachers.  The title is unfortunate because the book’s not really about free tuition; the subject doesn’t really get a look-in until about three-quarters of the way through.  Rather, Samuels’ book is mostly about (as he puts it in the title of his first chapter) why tuition goes up and quality goes down. 

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September 17, 2013 No Comments

Grants and Net Prices

Yesterday, we saw how tax credits lowered net prices by refunding students (or their families) roughly one out of every three dollars spent on tuition.  But that’s not the whole story, because there are a lot of university students who also get some form of non-repayable assistance (i.e. grants); for them, tuition is even lower. Let’s start with Quebec, where net tuition after tax expenditures is a mere $1,555.  Data from the latest Aide Financiere aux Etudes annual report, adjusted for known changes

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September 6, 2013 6 Comments

Affordability

At some point in the next week or so, Statistics Canada will be releasing its annual statistics on tuition fees.  Hopefully it will be less of a fiasco than last year, when they released data a few days after the Quebec election, but didn’t bother to note that the planned tuition fee hike was being reversed. What I want to do today is to put the inevitable “rising fees” stories that always accompany the Statscan release into some sort of

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September 5, 2013 6 Comments

The Impact of Tax Credits

One of the many ways that Canada stands out as unusual in its financing of higher education is the degree to which its subsidies to students and families runs not through loans or grants but through tax relief.  Well over $2 billion/year goes out to students that way; for full-time university students in Canada last year, tax credits on average amounted to $2,200, or almost a third of the sticker price. But given how central tax credits are to our

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September 4, 2013 1 Comment

Looking Forward to 2017-18

Last week we looked at likely paths for government funding in the big four provinces.  Today, I want to look at how that might translate into actual changes at institutions. The outlook for government funding, if you’ll recall, looks like this: Figure 1 – Nominal Non-Health Dollars Available by Province, indexed to 2013. But governments only account for about 54% of total revenue.  Students make up 39% and “other” makes up about 8%, so to look forward, one needs to look

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July 29, 2013 6 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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