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Tag: Student Debt

Debt, Tuition, and Inequality

A few weeks ago, I noted on Twitter that back when I was in student politics (24 years and counting) we opposed tuition hikes because we feared their negative effect on access.  Back then, fees hadn’t increased in real terms in almost two decades, so there wasn’t much evidence either way on the issue.  More than two decades on, the evidence has accumulated, and, on the whole, it turns out that what we believed back then was mostly mistaken: despite much higher

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October 28, 2013 1 Comment

A Persistent Problem with Truth

When it comes to the subjects of debt and tuition fees, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) is the least trustworthy source on earth.  They lie.  Constantly. To see the latest collection, just look at this press release, which averages roughly one lie per paragraph.  For instance: “Since 2006, tuition fees have increased as much as 71 per cent in Ontario”.  The words “as much as” are doing a lot of work here.  For the vast majority of programs, the 5% annual increase

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April 1, 2013 8 Comments

The Curious Case of Disappearing Student Debt

If you’re one of those people who obsessively follows stories about student debt, it’s possible you’ve heard some rumblings about the latest Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC) survey, which seems to show a drop in student debt over the last three years. CUSC is an important source of information about student debt in Canada.  Every three years, this consortium surveys a few tens of thousands of graduating students, and asks them (among other things) about their outstanding student debt.   We

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March 26, 2013 1 Comment

The US Debt Freak-Out

If you read the US papers at all, you’ll have noticed a recent ratcheting-up of panic about student debt.  Take Charles Blow’s recent New York Times column, which describes US debt levels  as “staggering”, and having “long-term implications for our society and our economy, as that debt begins to affect when and if young people start families or enter the housing market.” Some facts are in order. It is certainly true that, in the United States, it’s possible to accumulate some

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March 15, 2013 No Comments

Measuring the Effects of Student Loans

Measuring the effects of student loans is brutally difficult.  It sounds simple, but it’s not. Take a recent article called “Gender, Debt, and Dropping out of College“, published in Gender and Society, which made a small wave in access-conscious circles a couple of weeks ago.  Using data form the 1997 US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this article made two claims: first, that debt was positively correlated to completion up until a certain level of debt, after which the relationship reverses itself

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March 12, 2013 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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