All Posts Tagged With: "financial aid"
Where the rich kids go
Guess which universities get the least student financial aid
From Queen's Players "I go to Queen's!"
You know the stereotype that Queen’s University attracts rich kids? The one played up in this recent viral video in which a student jokes: “I don’t know what financial aid is, but Queen’s has it.”
Well, if the number of students receiving financial assistance is any indication, it’s very likely true.
Queen’s University has the lowest number of students receiving Ontario Student Assistance in the province: only 29.6 per cent of students.
Contrast that to Nipissing University in the relatively poorer north of Ontario, where twice as many—59.6 per cent—get loans. It’s almost as high at Trent University—59.3 per cent.
Study explores the reasons behind dropping out
Losing a job isn’t one of them
A recent study by researchers from Michigan State University found that college students who are considering dropping out are especially sensitive to “critical events” such as depression or a loss of financial aid.
That’s not too surprising, considering the fact that twenty-five per cent of students who visit university health clinics may be suffering from depression.
The surprising part of the study? Major events such as a death in the family, a significant injury, inability to enter their intended major, substance addiction, becoming engaged or married, or losing a job needed to pay tuition all had much less of an influence on the decision to drop out.
The supposedly small influence of losing a job surprises me because paying for books and tuition comes right down to the last dollar for many of us, even with part time jobs, student loans and scholarships. I know it would be tough for me to pay thousands of dollars in tuition and books each semester (even if you buy them second hand through friends or websites like AbeBooks, it can still add up) after suddenly losing a job or other source of money.
The study developed a mathematical model to describe the reasons behind students deciding to quit, analyzing surveys from 1,158 freshmen at 10 U.S. colleges and universities. The survey included a list of 21 “critical events” (such as the previously mentioned loss of financial aid or death in the family) and students were asked if they had experienced any of them during the previous semester. The students were later asked if they planned to withdraw.
Other events that influenced students included an unexpected bad grade, roommate conflicts, and being recruited by an employer or another institution.
Atlantic universities compete for students
Facing dropping enrolment, schools are starting to cast a wider recruitment net
With Atlantic provinces looking at a plunge in the number of high school graduates in the next decade, universities in the region are casting a wider recruitment net and becoming more competitive as they fight to attract students from a dwindling pool of applications.
After ten years of growth across the country, fewer students are enrolling in undergraduate programs, according to information released by Statistics Canada in July.
The Atlantic region is being hit the hardest. The number of full-time students declined in all four Atlantic provinces in 2007-2008 – from less than one per cent in New Brunswick to more than four per cent in Prince Edward Island.
An aging population means this trend may continue as fewer young people are going through the school system in Atlantic Canada.
The Nova Scotia Department of Education estimates there will be a 30 per cent drop in high school graduates in the next 10 years. In New Brunswick, the Department of Education places this figure closer to 20 per cent.
“It’s certainly something we’re concerned about … it means we will have to recruit perhaps a little more vigorously outside of the region,” said Gloria Jollymore, vice-president of advancement at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B.
Universities are preparing for the drop in Atlantic region applicants by evolving their communication strategies.
Schools are increasing their out-of-province recruitment efforts and expanding their presence on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
In June, Acadia’s Twitter account, Acadia4U, announced they sent out “Good luck on exams” cards and a bag of tea to potential students. The Acadia class of 2013 Facebook page, run by a recruiter, already has more than 500 members.
John MacFarlane, Acadia’s vice-president of advancement, said the pinch for students is a new issue that universities didn’t find themselves grappling with in the past.
“Nobody had to be concerned with fancy marketing and recruitment plans. Everyone is adjusting knowing that the market is shrinking,” said MacFarlane.
He said his undergraduate school in Wolfville, N.S., has hired full-time recruiters in Ontario and Alberta so interested students in those regions can speak directly to people about the school.
After summer job slump, students seek financial help
At Dal, number of students applying for need-based awards increased by 62 per cent
With summer jobs in short supply, many university and college students now face the prospect of trying to get through the school year on less money or looking for other sources of cash.
So it may not be surprising that along with the spike in the jobless rate, there’s been a corresponding rise in traffic to websites offering information on scholarships and bursaries.
At Studentawards.com, a free scholarship search service, the cumulative increase in registration was 15 per cent in July compared to last year, said Suzanne Tyson, president of Studentawards Inc., the company behind the website.
Parents’ RRSPs and the education savings plans they set up for their children have probably taken a hit amid the economic turmoil of the last year, she noted.
“(Parents) may be losing their jobs and their children aren’t finding jobs, it is leading us to believe that this fall will be difficult financially for a number of students,” she said.
The student unemployment rate was 20.9 per cent in July, according to Statistics Canada.
Matt Scriven is one of the lucky ones.
The 19-year-old was able to find work this summer, but says one of his friends in Vancouver handed out between 30 and 40 resumes and received one or two calls – and didn’t get a job. Another friend in Ottawa handed out 20 or 30 resumes, and got a job that gave him five to 10 hours a week – not really enough to help with his expenses in the coming school year, he said.
Scriven found his own eventual job as web designer for the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association through a listing at Studentopolis.ca – the student jobs website he founded.
The Carleton University student started developing his website after speaking with a friend who said he wasn’t able to find an easy source to access student job listings online.
“A lot of adult workers were laid off their other jobs and now people will do pretty much any job to try and supplement their income because they’ve got families and such, so a lot of students are displaced from positions that they would otherwise have,” Scriven said from Ottawa.
Tough times force more Ontario students to apply for aid
U of T has seen a 12 per cent increase in financial aid applications
The number of requests for student financial aid is on the rise in Ontario after a dismal economic year for young people, and university officials say it could be just the start of a flood of applicants that will wash over universities this fall.
“The messages we’re getting from students and their families is that the parents may have had full-time jobs in the early part of 2008, but things happened in 2009 and parents now have lower incomes this year,” said David Sidebottom, manager of financial aid services, admissions and awards at the University of Toronto, as he explained one reason for the increase.
The university has seen a 12 per cent increase in financial aid applications for the school year.
“Parents’ incomes have taken a hit in some cases,” said Sidebottom, who has been fielding calls from anxious students who’ve also struggled to find jobs to pay for their pricey education.
“Students have been having trouble finding full-time jobs going the whole summer,” said Sidebottom, adding that the municipal strike in Toronto also affected students relying on work with city run programs.
Ontario Student Assistance Program applications are up 5.7 per cent this year for colleges and 4.6 per cent for universities, said Patrick O’Jorman, a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities.
“It corresponds to the total number of applicants to schools,” said O’Jorman, who said university applications are also up five per cent.
Last week’s job report also painted a bleak picture for young people, showing a record student unemployment rate of 21 per cent in July.
For Rodney Diverlus, a 19-year-old student from Ryerson University, the challenge to find a summer job to pay his $5,500 tuition as a dance major was daunting and the choices were sparse.
Diverlus, who had worked for event planning organizations and NGOs in previous years, said he hoped to return to similar work, but his summer job became obsolete.
He said months of perusing job posting websites and following possible leads yielded scant results.
“There are moments where you get angry, and there are moments where you ask yourself could I have done more, but after applying for so many jobs, I don’t know,” said a frustrated Diverlus, who had no intention of applying for OSAP this year, but was forced to take out a student loan to pay for school.
Religious university head defends student aid program
N.B. program would limit student debt at graduation, even for private institutions
The CBC is reporting that the president of one of the New Brunswick’s three religious universities is defending the province’s decision to include the school’s students in a new debt-limiting program, despite the fact that the institution is private.
Critics argue that private universities shouldn’t be getting financial help while public universities are starved for cash.
The provincial government announced the Timely Completion Benefit in May. In the program, all post-secondary students who qualifies for the benefit will not have to pay back more than $26,000 in federal and provincial student loans as long as they graduate within the program’s set timeframe.
David Medders, the president of Bethany Bible College in Sussex, told the CBC that the the debt-cap program benefits students and not the school’s operating budget. He said it’s absurd to say the religious school shouldn’t be eligible for any government programs just because it’s private.
“If you took that [argument to its] logical conclusions, we shouldn’t receive city water because part of the taxpayers money in Sussex supports a town water system,” says Medders. “So you have to have some common sense, somewhere along the line in this. And I think where the government has struck that line — we call it a pluralistic society, and it’s mutual respect.”
Miriam Jones, a professor at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, told the CBC that the decision to allow these religious school to have access to the student debt-cap policy is a bad idea. She says the colleges are allowed to have Christian-only hiring policies because they’re private and that status should extend to funding.
“They shouldn’t get any public money unless they’re part of the public system and willing to subscribe to the standards and meet the criteria that the rest of us have to meet,” she says.
For more on this story, click here.
Aussie universities big winners in Rudd budget
Gov’t promises extra $5.3 billion, hopes to increase undergrad enrolment by 50,000
Australian universities were big winners earlier this week when the Australian Labour Party (the left of centre party in what is effectively a two party system) tabled its latest budget.
The university sector will be receiving an additional $5.3 billion over six years. The government hopes to increase enrolment by 50,000 undergraduate students by 2015.
The budget includes a significant overall of student financial aid policies, according to the Australian Broadcasting Company.
Textbook and travel grants: the good, the bad and the failed
Recent flip-flop by McGuinty government improves policy but could hurt party’s political image
Last Friday (as governments always release bad news on a Friday), the Ontario government announced the cancellation of planned improvements to student financial aid and said they would be scaling back the aid that is currently available. According to the province, the cuts are expected to save $103 million.
It is no secret that I thought the Textbook and Technology Grant was poor public policy and a political gimmick.
It was an election promise designed to maximize positive publicity for the government. The premise was simple: every full-time public post-secondary student attending an Ontario institution would receive a cheque from the government.
It sounded simple enough, so how hard could it be to implement? Get a list of students from each college and university, print a bunch of cheques, send them to Canada Post, and, voila!, every student in the province would get a cheque telling them how much Dalton McGuinty loves them.
Implementation wasn’t that easy, and the system seemed as if it had been designed to frustrate potential applicants.
The government decided there would be a web-based application that every student would use to get the grant. The government, perhaps as an indication of how little money they had to fulfill their election promises, did not engage in much promotion of the program. This resulted in many students not applying for the grant.
To add insult to injury, the government paid colleges and universities in order to provide student lists.
That said, it seems as if the government didn’t mind. After all, it didn’t matter that the grant was poor public policy; it was good politics. Premier Dalton McGuinty could go around the province saying he had “put into place brand new textbook and technology and distance grants…the first of its kind in the country.”
These cutbacks have made the grant a political weak spot for the government. The grants can now be called a broken election promise, which is a criticism to which McGuinty is vulnerable.
However, Friday’s announcement does improve the public policy aspect of these grants.
No longer will these grants go to individuals without any assessed financial need (which, in the overwhelming of incidences, correlates with a lack of financial need). This means money is no longer being directed to “student support,” which does nothing to actually support engagement in post-secondary education. For a student without financial need, the decision to continue in a post-secondary program will not be based on the cost of that education.
There is no longer a need for a costly administration process, as every student receiving OSAP will now automatically get the grant.
While not the best public policy, the new structure of the grant is definitely an improvement. True, there are more effective ways of delivering aid and the grant could be more targeted, but overall, the structure of the grant is better.
The fact the government is freezing the amount of the grant is disappointing. The government could have shown leadership and a true commitment to helping students in need, especially during this time of recession, by diverting funds to those with higher need instead of just cutting benefits to those students with low or no need.
Student alliance asks Ottawa to ease debt in downturn
Graduates with limited job prospects need help dealing with debt, says CASA
The Canadian Alliance of Student Associations is calling on Ottawa to ease the debt burden for people who are graduating in tough economic times with limited job prospects.
National director Zach Churchill says the government can do some simple things to help recent grads who will, on average, complete a four-year undergraduate degree more than $24,000 in debt.
The alliance argues the student financial-aid system should be more accessible and that tariffs on imported books need to be eliminated.
The comments come after meetings this week with government officials.
The Canadian Federation of Students recently called on Ottawa to increase transfer payments to the provinces in an effort to reduce skyrocketing tuition fees.
- The Canadian Press
Canadian attitudes toward learning
80 percent feel students have to borrow too much to pay for post-secondary education
The Canadian Council on Learning has released the results of an analysis of the 2008 Survey on Canadian Attitudes toward Learning, which was conducted jointly with Statistics Canada.
The survey was designed to gather information about Canadians’ opinions, beliefs and experiences pertaining to four aspects of lifelong learning, including early childhood learning, structured learning (elementary, secondary and post-secondary), work-related learning, and health and learning.
The following findings are of particular interest to researchers, policy makers and activists who are interested in the state of accessibility to post-secondary education:
- Canadians generally indicate that post-secondary institutions are doing a good job, except with respect to providing access to all qualified students.
- Canadians are particularly concerned about post-secondary access for low-income students.
- Canadians believe student loans and financial aid are generally available, but over 80% feel that students have to borrow too much to pay for post-secondary education.
The full report may be downloaded here in .pdf format.
Budget 2008: Good works
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.
• 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.
