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Tag: Student Loans

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (4)

If you’re joining late, we’re talking about the policy decisions that need to be made when creating a student aid system.  Read up on student loan origination, student loan repayment parameters and the loans/grants balance. So now we’ve got all the big pieces in place – where the money comes from, how much is going to be loan vs. grant, and how loans are going to be recuperated.  Now we get to the really fiddly bits: how to ration the aid (warning: this is a stupidly

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December 5, 2019 2 Comments

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (3)

Welcome back to this little series.  On Monday and Tuesday we looked at loans – how to pay for them and how to design repayment systems.  Today, I want to introduce grants into the mix (to be clear, I’m only talking about grants where need is the primary criterion – there’s a whole other set of policy considerations about merit-based aid, which I’m going to leave to one side during this discussion). Theoretically, the grants vs. loans debate is one of the most important

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December 4, 2019 1 Comment

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (2)

Now that we’ve decided on a loan system, we have to start thinking about how we are going to recover any money that we lend.  For decades, student loans only worked one way: on a regular amortization basis.  If you borrow, you repay on a regular monthly basis after graduation, just like one pays a regular amount each month on a mortgage.  Even within this framework, there are a lot of policy elements one can adjust.  The length of the

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December 3, 2019 No Comments

Designing Student Aid Programs from Scratch (1)

Over the years, I have concluded that one of the reasons policy debate can be so stifling is we’re usually debating options within existing policy parameters: that is, “fixes” to existing policy.  It’s pretty rare that anyone talks about “greenfield” policies in areas where no policy ever existed.  This is kind of a shame, because it means people don’t really understand the process of trade-offs that go into original policy-making. So, just for fun, I am going to spend this week talking about

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December 2, 2019 2 Comments

The Liberal Record

Though the writs won’t be issued for another few days, we are already deep into the election run-up. Over the course of the next few weeks I will be giving you some analysis of the various party platforms with respect to higher education. However, before we get to platforms, it’s worth taking a look back at the record of the current government. To break down their performance, let’s start by examining whether the Liberals actually delivered on their promises from

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September 4, 2019 1 Comment

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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