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Tag: Free Tuition

Why Student Debt Won’t Fall

[the_ad id=”12740″] Since 2011, the amount of grant aid available to students has increased enormously in Canada.  Partly that’s due to the 2016 Federal, Ontario and New Brunswick budgets, which shifted a whole whack of tax credits to grants, as well a more long-term shift towards grants and away from loans in both Ontario and Quebec as well as, more recently, Prince Edward Island as well.  The shift isn’t universal of course – in the other 7 provincial programs loan/grant

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June 19, 2018 No Comments

Post-Soviet Higher Education

As loyal readers know, I am a big believer that Soviet Higher Education teaches some real eternal truths about our sector (see here and here in particular).  This week I’ve been reading a book of essays called 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity edited by Jeroen Huisman, Anna Smolentseva and Isak Froumin.  And although structurally it’s a bit repetitive (as any book containing 15 identically-structured essays is likely to be), it’s very much worth a read

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June 15, 2018 No Comments

How Awful is Scottish Access Policy?

Here’s a story you might have heard about access policy in Scotland: the (right-wing, neoliberal) Labour government of the late 1990s imposed tuition fees on Scottish students and students were very hard done by. About a decade later, the (lefty, progressive) Scottish Nationalist Party government abolished tuition fees and everything was suddenly a student paradise.  You may even have heard about the commemorative stone the ex-SNP First Minister Alex Salmond had installed at Heriot-Watt university bearing the words “The rocks

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March 15, 2018 No Comments

Two Final Arguments about Free Fees

Yesterday when talking about the bad arguments for universal free fees, I left out two of the more common arguments.  One of them I left out because it’s genuinely a much trickier argument to negotiate (and hence not one of the “ten bad arguments”) and the other because I plain forgot.  Both of these arguments came up during discussions online—check out my Twitter feed if you’re curious. But let’s go over the arguments now. Start with the latter, because we can

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February 21, 2018 2 Comments

Ten Bad Arguments about Free Tuition in Canada

So this weekend at the NDP convention, delegates voted in favour of a free tuition policy.  Based on a totally unscientific scan of twitter afterwards, here are the ten most common arguments in favour of this move, and why each of them is wrong. 1. The federal government can totally impose free tuition on the provinces No, it can’t.  The best it could do would be to pay the provinces to reduce tuition, which could be difficult given that they

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February 20, 2018 17 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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