Category: Tuition

The theory that rising tuition affects access rests on one of two premises. Either the rise in price is leaving students liquidity-constrained (that is, they don’t have enough cash on hand to meet the costs) or they have decided the investment is no longer “worth it.” If the only issue is liquidity constraint, then the problem can be solved with student loans, but since anti-tuition types rarely make that argument, one has to assume that what they believe is that

One of the oddest things about the politics of higher education in Canada is the way that it seems to transcend divisions of left and right. You might think, as a rule of thumb, that left-wing governments tend to keep tuition low while right-wing governments are more comfortable with letting tuition rip. Globally, that’s more true than not, but there are significant exceptions – in the U.K. and Australia, for instance, tuition was introduced by Labour governments (though in both

One of the things that various anti-tuition types like to point to in debates is the number of countries which have “free tuition” (by which they mean the user pays nothing and the state pays everything). If these dozens of countries can do it, the argument goes, why can’t we? There are limits to this line of argument, as, on its own, it’s a variant of “my friends are jumping off a bridge, and I’d like to join them.” But perhaps these