All Posts Tagged With: "Alex Usher"

No party is making a serious effort at providing federal leadership

Today, the good folks over at Higher Education Strategy Associates released their long-awaited analysis of the party platforms regarding post-secondary education. They were clearly rejigging parts of the analysis right up to the end – the document is larded with pictures of the party leaders taken from VintageVoter.ca.

The analysis looks at federal education policy proposals under main headings: Student Aid, Transfers to Provinces and Institutions, Research, and Apprenticeships. The section on student aid takes up over half the analysis, largely because – as the report points out:

Looking across all party platforms, one is struck by how much the cost of postsecondary education dominates all other issues. Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking this was the only issue that mattered to federal parties.

Details on education transfers are notable for their absence in the Conservative and Liberal platforms and for their incoherence in the New Democrat one. Apart from a Conservative regurgitation of last month’s budget, policies on scientific research are essentially absent. And everyone apparently thinks Apprenticeships are a Good Thing but not so good as to actually require policy. Apart from these topics, only the New Democrats have shown any ambition at all in the area, with their promises on childcare and Aboriginal Education. Within PSE itself, the lack of vision and ideas is palpable.

The upshot is that federal approaches to higher education amount to this: The Conservatives are offering slight tweaks to the existing student aid system, while the NDP are proposing to just throw more cash at it. The HESA analysis credits the Liberals with having “the most intriguing and certainly the best thought-out” platform regarding student aid; the Learning Passport idea is the only one that hints at re-imagining the way student aid works, and the only one that promises to inject even a modicum of progressivity into the system.

But overall, the analysis is pretty depressing. Jean Chretien was the last prime minister to make a serious effort at providing federal leadership in higher education and to have a vision for the role higher education can play in a modern economy, but that was fifteen years ago. Since then, federal policy has been a wasteland of boutique tax breaks and minor tweaks to student aid. Any grander conviction that a country’s universities are among its most crucial institutions, and that supporting those institutions is in the national interest, is completely absent.

Originally posted at Macleans.ca.

Ex-CEO says province should use Irish model for post-secondary education

Responding the Educational Policy Institute’s recent proposal that colleges and universities increase tuition fees by up to 25 per cent, a former chairperson of the College of the North Atlantic Board of Governors is instead calling for the implementation of free tuition in Newfoundland and Labrador following the model used for post-secondary education in Ireland.

Vince Withers, former President and CEO of NewTel Communications (now part of Bell Aliant) and an honorary graduand of Memorial University, told a St. John’s talk radio show that he “can’t understand why anyone would call for a dramatic increase in tuition fees”. Withers went on to say that he doesn’t believe that Premier Danny Williams will consider lifting the province’s fee freeze, which has been in place for over a decade.

New study says the real cost of university is falling. One province is even paying its students

On Nov. 5, the streets of downtown Ottawa were flooded with angry students frantically waving red-and-black “Drop Fees” signs. Nationwide, thousands rallied, demanding protection from what everyone knows are skyrocketing tuition fees. This is probably the image that springs to mind when you think about the price of a university education in Canada: students protesting, and tuition fees that just keep going higher and higher.

But according to a new report by Canada’s only higher education think tank, the cost of a university education for the average Canadian is actually going down: when inflation and a growing list of federal and provincial tax breaks are taken into account, a degree is now slightly cheaper than at the turn of the century. The real cost of an education has fallen in most provinces. In Manitoba, real tuition costs are down more than 100 per cent in the last eight years—which means that the average student in that province is effectively being paid $51 a month to go to school.

These surprising findings come from a recent report from the Educational Policy Institute (EPI). Alex Usher, director of the Canadian arm of the international think tank and the study’s co-author, says the commonly held view that university is becoming unaffordable is just plain wrong. “By any reasonable measure, education is a lot more affordable now here than it was 10 years ago,” says Usher.

More: Overview of federal/provincial tax credits and rebates

Tuition and related fees have been steadily rising in most provinces. But according to, “Beyond the Sticker Shock 2008–A Closer Look at Canadian Tuition Fees,” the tuition sticker price is not the real measure of the cost of university. Governments are offering a growing list of tax credits and rebates, targeted at students, which greatly reduce the real cost of university. It’s as if you walked into a car dealership and saw that the sticker price of a car was $20,000—but were also told all buyers would receive a $5,000 rebate. The real cost of the car would be $15,000, not $20,000.

That’s what’s been going with Canadian university costs: sticker prices are going up, but student tax credits and rebates are increasing, too. “Since 1999-2000, these credits have completely offset out the effects of any increases in tuitions,” says the report. “[Tuition] is no higher now than it was eight years ago.”

In order to accurately measure real tuition costs, Usher and EPI created a measure that takes into account inflation, as well as the growing amount of tax relief offered to students, calling the resulting number “Everybody’s Net Tuition”. Over the past few years, governments have introduced a number of large tax breaks targeted at higher education students. For example, for every month that they are enrolled, full-time students can claim a $400 tax credit from the federal government; part-time students can claim $120 per month. The textbook and technology tax credit, introduced in 2006, gives $65 off a month to full-time students and $20 a month to part-timers. Usher says taking such tax benefits into consideration and subtracting them from average tuition gives a more accurate picture of what university actually costs.

Value of Available Tax Credits per Full-Time University Student (click on charts to enlarge)

Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells on changes to student aid in Canada

From Alex Usher at the indispensable Educational Policy Institute, a grown-up assessment of the student-aid provisions in yesterday’s federal budget. Alex demonstrates real design flaws that should be fixed before the Canada Student Grants are implemented. But a few things are clearer today than they were last night.

Read Paul Wells’ blog “Inkless Wells” for more commentary

• Jean Chrétien’s Year 2000 bauble, the Canada Millennium Scholarships — designed to last a decade and scheduled to run out next year — will not leave a vacuum behind when they disappear. Despite major design flaws, the Millennium Scholarships were appreciated by student groups who worried mightily about their disappearance. (OK, try not to notice that only 621 people signed the CASA petition. Work with me here a bit.) And in retrospect, as millennium projects go — remember when everyone thought they needed a millennium project? Strange days — a massive investment in human capital did make a lot more sense than, say, a dome.

• Unlike the Chrétien-Martin formula of a one-time allocation to a “foundation” that is designed to be spent down to zero — and to produce a funding crisis in its last year — the Canada Student Grants are part of regular annual program spending. This means they are permanent, at least insofar as, like any other program, the only way to get rid of them is to shut down the budget line, which will get noticed if it ever happens. And the total amount in the grant program is budgeted, in the first few years, to increase every year, not to hold at a steady-state of about $350 million.

• The new grants reach massively more students than the Millennium Scholarships did, though they do it by giving each recipient less money. Whether you like that will depend on whether you would have qualified for one of the old awards. But the new grants also distribute the money in a different, smarter way: the CSG bursaries will be paid up-front, to keep students from incurring debt at the outset. Millennium scholarship money was typically paid after a student completed her studies, to help pay down debt that had already been incurred.

• The Millennium Scholarships suffered from more than a year of confusion at the outset because nobody could decide whether they were need- or merit-based. Chrétien wanted a substantial merit component. That eventually got sorted out, but the Tories avoid this confusion by launching two discrete programs: the CSG (income-based, which as Usher points out is different from need-based and, if your income is low, better) and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships (scroll down, it’s in here somewhere). At first glance, these looked trivial to me — only 500 a year. But on a population basis, that makes the program comparable in size to the U.S. Fulbright program, and way bigger than the Trudeau Scholars program, which funds about 15 recipients per year. And those comparisons seem apt: the “merit” being rewarded here appears to be top-in-the-world merit, not garden-variety, you-win-if-you-get-an-A merit. Because the Vanier scholarships are international — foreigners can win them to study in Canada, Canadians can win them to help study abroad — they can, over time, constitute a powerful signal that Canadian universities aspire not only to house large student cohorts but, here and there at least, to encourage and welcome genius.

ON-THE-OTHER-HAND UPDATE: It looks like all the new money for the research granting councils is targeted toward specific fields of research. This is silly, and reflects the Harper government’s deep-seated conviction that surprise and individual initiative — whether it comes from the Tory back bench, the press gallery, or a laboratory somewhere — are bad news.

STRATEGY UPDATE: Still, wounded Liberals who don’t like being called chicken may ask, if on balance the budget does good things then why should the Liberals bring the government down?
Short answer: Because since when do Liberals want to be in the business of letting Conservative governments introduce useful budgets? If the opposition were working in its own interests, instead of second-guessing itself into a tailspin, it would already have defeated the Harper government before budget day.