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Tag: Student Loans

Canada’s Income-Contingent Loan System

I see that yet another group has called for Canada to have an income-contingent Loan Program to help students fund their higher education studies.  Great idea.  In fact, it’s so great that the country adopted an income-contingent system five years ago. It’s just that nobody noticed. Many people think that income-contingency requires that loan repayments be a fixed percentage of individual income, or that loan recovery be handled through the tax system.  While it’s true that some of the world’s

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January 20, 2014 3 Comments

Income-Contingent Loan Problems

Everyone who’s ever given thought to the matter thinks that income-contingent loans are superior to mortgage-style loans.  At any given level of debt, it’s always preferable for low-income borrowers in repayment to have the option to suspend payments, and make them up at a later time.  Pretty much all the objections to income-contingency – especially here in Canada – are about matters extraneous to the actual method of loan repayment (e.g. fees would rise, interest is too high, etc.). The

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December 5, 2013 No Comments

Higher Education Tax Credits

Last week, CD Howe released a very good paper (available here) written by my colleague, Christine Neill, on the subject of tax credits in higher education.  It’s an important piece, because it not only puts in one place a number of key factual aspects of tax credits (what they cover, how much they’re worth), but it also places them in the context of research on behavioural economics.  Given what we know about behavioural economics, she asks, what should we expect

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November 22, 2013 No Comments

So, This Obama Plan, Then (Part 2)

To recap yesterday’s blog: President Obama has a plan to make colleges reduce their costs, and deliver better value for money.  It involves having the government rate institutions on Accessibility, Affordability, and Outcomes; those which rate poorly risk losing eligibility for various forms of federal student aid (which, in total, is up around $150 billion/year these days). While there’s no question that college costs do need to be reined in, this particular solution strikes me as odd.  Here’s what you

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August 30, 2013 No Comments

A Thought for Gabriel Betancourt

In early 1918, a fellow by the name of Gabriel Betancourt was born in Medellin, Colombia.  If the name sounds faintly familiar, it’s probably because of his daughter, Ingrid, the Colombia politician who was famously held captive by FARC guerrillas for six years.  But in education, Gabriel is the one that matters.  He’s the one who invented the idea of student loans. To be fair, student loans weren’t entirely unheard of prior to WWII, but they were rare, and were offered by

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April 26, 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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