The COVID-19 pandemic poses financial challenges for students worldwide, especially for those in higher education where free and universal access is not guaranteed. Students in developed economies, a long-neglected group for pandemic studies, are not exceptions. The motivation of this study is to examine subjective financial well-being of…

The purpose of this study is to outline a new approach to the comparative analysis of student finance systems based on social rights, an approach widely applied in other areas of social policy. It focuses on rights codified in national legislation and financed by central governments, and the collection of indicators measuring formal eligibility…

Universities recruit international students for a number of reasons, including enhancement of global contacts and reputation, to increase enrolment, and to generate revenue from tuition. These students face unique challenges as compared with domestic students, but no published studies or reports exist on this issue. In this article we report our…

This study compares tuition funding arrangements, debt at graduation, and earnings outcomes for full-time domestic undergraduates in eight Anglophone countries: the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland), United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. According to multiple estimates, the average English student faces…

The Ministry of Education in Canada's province of Quebec is threatening to significantly reduce McGill University (McGill)'s operating grant in response to a proposed Master's of Business Administration (MBA) tuition fee increase. From September 2010, the university's Desautels Faculty of Management is aiming to substantially raise the current…

While higher education is regarded a high priority for economic development in many countries, public budgets often fall short to support desired levels of expansion in higher education. This leads to cost-sharing: students and their families are required to contribute more to the costs of higher education. This paper explores worldwide trends to…

Policy-makers and institutional administrators have long struggled with the question of college and university student tuition fees. In many ways this struggle may be characterized as a negotiation between two distinct policy goals: providing revenue to adequately finance higher education and ensuring student accessibility to higher education. The…

In 2006 the Educational Policy Institute released the first edition of "Beyond the Sticker Price: A Closer Look at Canadian University Tuition Fees." The report presented a new way by which to look at the prices and costs associated with university tuition, an alternative to the annual tuition fee report produced by Statistics Canada…

At some point every August, Statistics Canada releases its annual tuition fee report. Statistics Canada's numbers are accurate, so far as they go. The weighted provincial and national fee totals accurately reflect the amount of tuition charged by institution. And yet, the tuition report is at the same time a completely inadequate tool for…

The prospect of tuition fee increases for public sector universities has attracted an enormous amount of attention in recent years as governments in all industrialized countries have responded to the converging pressures of increased demands for higher education and rising costs of competing areas of social spending. I show that this dilemma is…

The study uses individual data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey to consider economic factors in university participation decisions by persons aged 17-24 from 1976 to 2003. The level of real tuition is one economic factor that may affect the university participation decision. There is also regional variation in the opportunity cost of…

This report looks at the affordability of public 4-year post-secondary education in 50 US States and 10 Canadian provinces. Public 4-year post-secondary education was found to be more affordable in the United States on five of the six affordability measures in the report; on the sixth, the two countries were tied. In general, in the United States…

The Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE) regularly evaluates the experience of international students in Canada through a benchmarking survey. Canada First 2009 represents the fourth time CBIE has conducted this research. Previous editions appeared in 1988, 1999 and 2004. This year's survey used a revised questionnaire similar to…

Access and affordability are bountiful concepts and key words used by policy makers in defining the role of post-secondary education and training in Canada. However, these words have not translated into action for many learners due to student debt. Incurred from high tuition fees, costly and complex payback schemes and under-funding, chronic…

There was a major change in Canadian student aid in the late 1990s, due largely to a package of measures adopted by the Government Canada as part of its "Canada Opportunities Strategy". At the time, what aroused the most comment was the creation in 1998 of the $2.5 billion Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation (Foundation). But while…