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Tag: Free Tuition

Strange, Inconsistent Arguments for Free Tuition

Every few weeks, it seems, someone shows up on twitter just aching to serve me some dubious justification for free tuition.   Let me recount two recent favourites. The first is the “oh but progressive taxation argument”.  It goes like this: Me: “You know universal subsidies for higher education are regressive, right?  On account of how the take-up rate for higher education – the likelihood of attending, the length of attendance, etc. – is positively correlated with family socio-economic status”?  (check back to

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March 12, 2019 3 Comments

How Not to Argue About Free Tuition (New Zealand Edition)

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about how Canada needs better data to improve understanding of what various types of intervention – like Alberta’s tuition freeze or Targeted Free Tuition in Ontario and New Brunswick –do in terms of access.  But data is not enough: it’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.  An example from our friends down in New Zealand can perhaps show why. We are coming up on the first anniversary of the implementation of free first-year

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November 29, 2018 No Comments

Free Tuition Tomfoolery at CCPA

[the_ad id=”11745″] The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) put out its Alternative Federal Budget last month (earlier and much shorter than usual, for reasons I don’t understand).  As has been the case for the last couple of years, the AFB included a “free tuition” program.  Basically, their idea is a conditional transfer to provinces to “eliminate tuition fees in all programs” on condition that provinces “match their share of the cost” and observe some as-of-yet non-existent Canada Post-Secondary Education

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October 3, 2018 2 Comments

“Free Fees” in New Zealand

New Zealand recently became the darling of a certain wing of the post-secondary world when it’s new Labour Government, led by Jacinda Arden, translated a second-place finish in the 2017 election into government (via some deft coalition negotiations) and proceeded to implement a free-tuition plan. Tuition-free universities aren’t new to New Zealand; in fact the whole country was more or less tuition free until 1991.  It was in that year that a former Labour government (of an unusually pro-market, privatizing

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September 27, 2018 2 Comments

André Picard Shills for the One Percent

You may have heard about New York University’s appalling plan to make tuition free at its medical school.  This is, I am sure, a great gimmick to promote NYU among the upper classes of the Northeastern US.  But it is a terrible use of money.  The beneficiaries will come from BY FAR the most privileged stratum of society and once they graduate they will themselves join that same ludicrously privileged stratum.  If one were trying to design a post-secondary subsidy that was as regressive as

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August 31, 2018 No Comments

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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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