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Tag: Student Debt

Income-Contingent Loans (Repaid Through the Tax System)

Every once in awhile, someone important says that what Canada/America really needs are income-contingent loans.  I usually reply, “we have income-contingent loans in Canada/America, that’s what the Repayment Assistance Program/Income Based Repayment program does”. To which the rejoinder is “no, no, that’s not income-contingent, what I mean by income-contingent is recovery of the loan is done automatically through the tax system, so you don’t run into all these messy issues around borrowers in repayment having not signed up for things”.

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March 3, 2016 No Comments

Would Lower Tuition or Lower Student Debt Improve the Economy?

Short answer: not really, no.  But judging by this Chronicle Herald article last week entitled “Eliminating Tuition Fees would Buoy Bluenose Economy“, bad ideas die hard.  So let’s think this one through. As I wrote back here, there are basically four ways to lower tuition or reduce student debt.  Government can raise taxes to pay for it, borrow to pay for it, re-allocate spending to pay for it, or reduce the cost of educational provision (i.e., cut spending on equipment and salaries).  If you

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January 18, 2016 1 Comment

Summer Updates from Abroad (1): England’s Demented Student Loans Policies

You’ll recall that the UK had an election in early May in which the Conservative Party, contrary to most polling, won a majority of seats, and thus was able to form a government without need for a coalition.  On July 8, the new government delivered its first budget, which contained a lot of policies that – to put it mildly – had not exactly been fully outlined to the electorate eight weeks earlier. In student aid, what that meant was

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July 22, 2015 1 Comment

Student Debt in Canada: Sorry, Still no Crisis

If you’re in the looking-at-student-debt business in Canada, your data sources are limited.  Provinces could publish their debt figures annually, but they don’t.  Canada Student Loans does publish its debt numbers annually, but it includes nothing on provincial debt, so it’s not very useful.  Statistics Canada surveys graduating students every five years, but only three years out from graduation, so the most recent data we have from that source is now five years old.  Kinda sucks. But there is one

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July 16, 2015 No Comments

Lowering Tuition in the UK

So, the UK Labour Party has decided that if it gets elected this spring (odds: probably just less than even), it will bring tuition fees down from their current maximum of £9,000/year to a maximum of £6,000/year. Progressive, right?  Not in a million years. As I pointed out back here, the weirdness of the UK system of fees and income contingent loans is that fees have risen so high that very few people – about one in five – are expected

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March 3, 2015 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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