Category: Tuition

A Prayer for Noah Morris

Noah Morris runs the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). He is the unfortunate soul who has the unenviable task of implementing Dalton McGuinty’s promise to give students 30% tuition rebates if they came from families with less than $160,000 in family income. It may have been popular electorally, but in policy terms it’s got “ugly” written all over it. The government could have implemented this through the OSAP system by just cutting cheques to student aid recipients. But no: somebody

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The Robin des Bois of Canadian Higher Education

In its budget this past spring, Jean Charest’s government announced its plans to increase tuition in Quebec by $325 per year for five years, beginning next fall. By 2016-17, the basic undergraduate tuition in Quebec will reach $3,792 for a typical, 30-credit year. While the tuition increase will keep Quebec students’ fees well below the average elsewhere in Canada, the increases still clock in at 75% over five years. Clearly there is potential for a significant impact on enrolment. So it

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By Their Actions Shall Ye Know Them

There are two ways of thinking about student unions. You can think of them as being (a) populated by idealists, who only want education for all, or you can think of them as (b) actual unions, prioritizing wins (financial and otherwise) for their members – who, let’s recall, tend to come from wealthier backgrounds than society as a whole – ahead of any other cause. With that in mind, let’s look at the some recent public statements from the Canadian

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What the U.K. Tuition Fight Tells Us About Universities

The U.K. is a great country when it comes to higher education innovation – good or bad, they’re not afraid to take new policy ideas to their logical conclusion. Their most recent move – allowing tuition fees to rise up to £9000 – is a case in point, and it is already providing some valuable lessons with respect to the essential dilemmas of higher education policy. The government clearly thought that this kind of “big bang” deregulation of tuition would

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The Newfoundland Strategy

There was an interesting study out last month from a group of scholars at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), led by Education Professor and Canadian Higher Education über-blogger Dale Kirby, called Matriculating Eastward . With MUN’s out-of-province student numbers skyrocketing in recent years (intake from the other Atlantic provinces has risen fivefold since 2002), the report used both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the reasons that out-of-province students chose Memorial as their place of study. Not surprisingly, cost emerges as

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