Michael Ignatieff announces Canadian Learning Passport
- A Liberal government will open the doors for every young Canadian who wants to go to college or university with a historic new $1-billion Learning Passport.
- The message Liberals are giving to every one of our kids is: if you get the grades, you get to go.
- The Learning Passport will be a powerful tool for reducing barriers to attending college and university, increasing the flow of highly skilled workers into the Canadian economy.
- Canadian families want to invest in learning but the cost of college and university is slipping out of reach for too many middle-class families.
- Across the country, families are struggling to save enough to give their kids a shot at college or university. Liberals are standing with them.
- Liberals can strengthen families – without raising your taxes – if we stop corporate giveaways, control wasteful spending, and focus on what really matters: giving every Canadian the tools to succeed in the years ahead.
6 comments:
You do know that the RESP has been in place for many years.
The gov't already kicks in up to $400 a yr./ per kid.
Is this plan going to replace it?
Do you expect more kids to enroll in universities? If so then how much will have to be spent in creating more space and hiring more profs. and staff etc.
And how is this different from the Canada Student loans/grant program in place? Students can get $2000 Canada student grant now per year. Is Ignatieff planning to cut that in half?
At many schools an extra $1000 won't even cover the tuition increases over the past decade. This isn't revolutionary, it's just beer and chips money. Frankly, it's the sort of insulting half-measure I'd expect from the Harper team.
Sorry James, this proposal without mentioning what the payback or interest will be is just an attempt at nothing. Gawd...you Libs just got to get it together and it isn't going to happen with Iggy either.
I'm not sure he's thought this one through. Certainly the proposal could have used the advice of educators.
Right off the bat, I wonder, what happens to people who did not get the grades - do they no longer get to go? Are they forever locked out?
I was a First Class Honours graduate in university (yeah yeah, don't look so surprised). But my high school grades were abyssmal (I actually failed English, because I boycotted all the tests on Dickens). Should I be shut out of university?
But also - you can spend a billion dollars on RESPs without adding one extra seat at university. Because it's well documented that as aid to students increases, tuitions increase. This is especially the case if either the loan system or the university system is privately managed.
Higher education is slipping out of reach of so many people not simply because it is getting more expensive, but because the gap between rich and poor is increasingly rapidly, and the rich increasingly outnumber, and advocate against, measures that actually help the poor.
So while I think Ignatieff's objective is in the right place, the actual proposal shows that he hasn't actually put in the research and study needed to come up with an effective education policy, and this, unfortunately, shows me that it's not actually a priority to him at all.
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