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 but which in practice is about $13,000 per year.

Implicitly, the policy assumes both partners are students (in which case why not just treat their two applications as individual independent students?). But if the couple has one student and one non-student, the implications are mind-bogglingly punitive. Essentially, as soon as the non-student earns anything over about $35,000 per year, the expected contribution jumps so high that it is impossible for his/her spouse to get a loan. At any given level of family income a spouse is expected to contribute $15,000 more to a student’s education than a parent would.

Thanks to this policy, families with one spouse in school and one spouse working face an effective tax rate (that is, taxes paid plus reductions in benefits) of…drum roll, please…over 90%. And that’s only if the working spouse is debt-free. If they are repaying their student loan as well, the income phase-out on Repayment Assistance means that the effective tax rate on spousal incomes rises to well over 100%. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more text-book example of a welfare wall – the disincentives to work are just phenomenal.

I could go on, but I’ll spare you the gory details (though for more deets, you can check out I Love You Brad, But You Reduce My Student Loan Eligibility which is a few years old but still basically correct). It’s just a clumsy set of rules written twenty years ago when pinching pennies regularly trumped good policy-making. But bureaucratic inertia has left this clunker on the books for too long. It’s terrible policy, which no one in government can defend with a straight face. It’s not just inequitable; it creates a serious barrier to mature students (many of whom are married) returning to school.

Married students don’t have their own organized interest group and for some reason, this isn’t a cause student unions have seen fit to take up on their behalf. But if, like me, you think this needs changing, just forward this email to diane.finley at parl.gc.ca and let her know this mistake needs fixing.

Let’s see what happens.