With Thursday’s unveiling of the 2017 provincial budget, we’re reminded that last year’s budget included an announcement (with great fanfare) of reforms to the Ontario Student Assistance Program, or OSAP. Those reforms were designed to encourage and support more low-income youth to attend postsecondary education, and, as HEQCO has said before, that’s a really great idea!However, to know if the reforms are working, we need […]
Martin Hicks and Fiona Deller – An Homage to Good Data
Those of us focused on facts rather than anecdotes have known all along that the alleged collapse of employment opportunities for higher education graduates is untrue. At HEQCO, we have published on this. And now comes a major breakthrough, a significant step forward, in our data-driven understanding of outcomes for Canadian college and university graduates. We are referring to Barista or Better, the newest release […]
HEQCO – Hunting for Good WIL: Put quality before quantity
Work-integrated learning (WIL) and experiential education (EE) are hot topics. This focus has been amplified by recent recommendations from the Business Council of Canada and the Ontario Premier’s Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel, as well as reinforced by comments from the Premier, that 100% of postsecondary students should have at least one WIL or EE experience by the time they complete their postsecondary education.We at […]
Martin Hicks and Fiona Deller – Free Tuition: Neither a pig nor in a poke
Free tuition is not a political slogan. It is an important new program that will increase access to higher education for low-income and marginalized Ontarians. Now that we are finally ready to deploy it, let’s please not immediately politicize it away.A long time ago, back before 1991, Ontario’s student assistance program, OSAP, was pretty simple. Your tuition and living needs were added up. You got […]
HEQCO – A triumph of evidence-based decision-making
In last Thursday’s budget, the Ontario government announced significant changes to the way student financial aid will be packaged to encourage greater participation of students from low income families. These changes come after years of research from HEQCO, and other organizations, about the inhibitory effects of a high tuition sticker price and loan aversion on the willingness of students from low family incomes to consider […]
About HEQCO
The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) is an agency of the Government of Ontario bringing evidence-based research to the continued improvement of postsecondary education in Ontario
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