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Category: Tuition

Tax Deductibility

Here’s a question which I think may get a little more attention over the next few years, largely because the OECD has made it one of the principal recommendations under its new Skills Strategy. Should tuition be tax deductible? We’ve been here before, actually. Back in 1959, Diefenbaker was looking for something to counter the “national scholarships” idea being touted by Lester Pearson which was (a) less costly and (b) less irritating to Quebec. Eventually, he glommed onto a pitch of

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November 29, 2012 2 Comments

Student Aid Tax Rates

Anyone who thinks taxation is overly complicated and onerous in this country needs to spend a day or two in the shoes of a student. That’s because our tax system has absolutely nothing on our student aid assessment system. Student aid in Canada is distributed based on something called “assessed need”, which is defined as “assessed costs” minus “assessed resources” (not real costs or real resources, because those are subjective). Essentially, government has to ask students about their resources and

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November 12, 2012 1 Comment

Spousal Income

Over the past decade, successive Canadian governments have tried to give bigger and bigger breaks to parents through the student aid system. Loan eligibility has steadily been widened to richer and richer families by making expected parental contributions less onerous. But for some reason, no recent government has seen fit to change spousal contribution rates. Since the mid-1990s, this rate has been set at 80% of the spouse’s combined net income over a threshold which varies a bit by province

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November 7, 2012 No Comments

Setting Tuition

Some interesting news out of Florida last week: Governor Rick Scott (or rather, a task force he created) wants to set tuition in so as to encourage enrolments in the sciences and engineering; so, basically, he’s proposing that tuition in those disciplines remain frozen for a number of years while at the same time allowing it to rise in disciplines deemed less “worthy” (arts, business, etc.). There are some fairly obvious drawbacks to this idea: not everyone is equally skilled

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October 30, 2012 1 Comment

Pop Quiz

So, we all know that tuition is terrible because it’s perfectly obviousthat tuition impedes access. Right? I mean, come on. Who doesn’t know this? Ok, try this on for size: There have been four jurisdictions that have had major changes in tuition policy in the last fifteen years. Ontario in 1996 (a series of increases from 1996-99 of roughly 20% per annum), Manitoba in 2000 (a 10% cut in tuition with a freeze thereafter), Newfoundland and Labrador in 2000 (a 20% decrease in fees

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October 29, 2012 1 Comment

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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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