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Tag: Student Debt

Comparing Student Loan Outcomes

Yesterday, I said that the system of English student loans were the worst in the world. And I know the skeptical among you probably thought “how can he say that? Where is the comparative data?” So, today, some data on student loans programs around the world which will show, definitively, how awful the English system is. Let’s start with a basic piece of contextual data, which is that there are huge differences between countries when it comes to the percentage

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March 25, 2026 1 Comment

Student Debt by Ethnicity

Hi all. Just a quick one today, this time on some data I recently got from StatsCan. We know a fair a bit about student debt in Canada, especially with respect to distribution by gender, type of institution, province, etc. (Chapter 6 of The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada is just chock full of this kind of data if you’re minded to take a deeper dive). But to my knowledge no one has ever pulled and published the data

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January 27, 2025 No Comments

A Sub-par Study on Returns to Education

Last Week, Royal Bank produced a study with the brash headline “Financial Returns After a Post-Secondary Education Have Diminished.” Within the limited terms of the limited methodology of the first half of the mini-paper, the headline is not entirely incorrect. But man, this is a disappointing piece of analysis from an organization with pretensions to thought leadership. So, what does this paper say? Basically, part 1 of the paper takes four data points for university (NOT all of post-secondary—strike one

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September 17, 2024 1 Comment

What if We Have Been Measuring Student Debt Wrong All Along?

I was just running the numbers on student debt in Ontario. They are interesting. Time used to be that the Provincial government published these numbers on its own. This Ontario open data set has data from 2003-04 to 2011-12. Since then, I have been filing FOI requests and the government have been providing identical basis. Figure 1 shows the results, according to the administrative data held by the Government of Ontario. Turns out that based on this data—which should be

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June 3, 2024 3 Comments

The Politics of Student Loan Debt

I am sure most of my readers are aware of the Biden Administration’s plans to forgive student loans.  However, what may have gone under the radar is the way the current administration is staking a lot of money on an attempt to re-build the country’s student loan system.  The basics are this: the Democrats want to make student aid repayment easier in three ways.  The first is by raising the repayment threshold – that is, the income level at which

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February 8, 2023 1 Comment

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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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