Category: Tuition

Ontario in a Nutshell

All righty then: so far in this nutshell series we’ve avoided writing about the two “big” provinces, but since Ontario is going to the polls this week, we thought it made sense to tackle that province today, before we get to the manifesto.  Let’s start with student numbers.  You need to remember that Ontario is big.  Where post-secondary numbers are concerned, it has an even bigger footprint than it does in terms of physical size or population.  43% of all university

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New Brunswick in a Nutshell

Morning everyone.  Today’s edition of the Nutshell series features one of the more anomalous provinces in Canada (from a higher education perspective, at least), the one whose beaches Le Monde once referred to as “Canada’s Riviera”: New Brunswick! New Brunswick’s anomalous status is mostly centered around the issue of enrolment: it is the only province in Confederation that has seen effectively no growth over the past two decades.  This is not to say that there have been no changes –

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Manitoba in a Nutshell

Good morning. We’ve done “nutshell” portraits of Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia.   Now, on to the greatest province of them all, the only one that shot its way into Confederation, Manitoba. Let’s start with student numbers.  Manitoba has seen slow but steady growth on the university side, with numbers growing from 25,000 to 40,000 between 2001 and 2020  With colleges, it is hard to be exact about growth rates since a substantial portion of the increase shown here was in fact due to changing Statistics Canada

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Nova Scotia in a Nutshell

As you may know, the HESA Towers team spends part of every summer compiling The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, which tracks national trends in higher education.  But what we don’t often do is go a level below that, to look in depth at what’s happening in individual provinces and how these developments compare to what is going on in other parts of the country.   So, for the next few weeks, we are presenting a statistical portrait of what

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Tennessee’s Free Tuition Experiment Reconsidered

Long time readers may remember about six years ago I examined a program known as the Tennessee Promise, one of the earlier “free tuition” programs in the US.  Technically, it was not a “free tuition” scheme, but rather what was known as a “last dollar scholarship”, meaning that after applying all other scholarships or need-based aid, the state brings the “net tuition” to zero.  What I found was that if you looked just at students coming out of secondary school

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