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They're From the Government, and They're Here to Help!
May 23, 2008
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
Sometimes, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at governments and their efforts to “help” parents and students. We’ve all hears the mantras from government – education is expensive, it’s so important to plan for education, etc. Heck, up here the government has managed to even get Education Savings brochures into hospitals so that parents can think about setting up savings plans for their wee ones while they’re in the post-natal recovery room.
As our minister for Human Resources said on Wednesday, "Families and students need straightforward solutions that they can count on from the time they start planning for post-secondary education to the time it is completed." True enough, Mr. Solberg. But the problem is that good planning requires good information. And the flow of good information coming from government is pretty small. The flow of bad and untimely information is, unfortunately, pretty high.
Let’s take student aid as an example. Students need to know as early as possible how much aid they are going to get so that they can make the necessary financial arrangements such as pick up an extra job over the last few months of school. In the US, you can apply for student aid starting in the fall prior to attending school, which gives students ten or eleven months to apply.
In Canada? Some provinces don’t even print their forms until March. In one large province, nothing gets processed until June. In many cases, students don’t know their aid package until July. Governments want students to plan, but they withhold the crucial information about student aid until it’s too late to make alternate arrangements.
Well, plead some provinces, our provincial budgets don’t get passed until February or March – how can we design a form before the legislature decides if it wants any changes to the program? Nonsense. If a provincial legislature wants to goose the student loan program, they can do what the federal government now does: announce changes 18 months in advance, so that they take effect in the following academic year. That way, there are no surprises for anyone, and we can get on with the business of informing students and families about their aid packages in a time frame that makes sense.
Ah, some may say. But what about those nifty student aid calculators, like the one on the Canlearn website? They give students a pretty good idea of what they can get, don’t they? Why worry about the actual aid application schedule and just use those?
Well, funny you should mention that, because my colleague Ryan Dunn and I were on the Canlearn website just the other day. Turns out that the student calculator on the Government of Canada’s flagship educational resource website flat-out doesn’t work. We spent half an hour trying to figure out why our need assessment didn’t change no matter which province we said we were studying in and how much money we said our parents made. Turned out that the “need” figure the calculator spit out was exactly equal to the educational costs we had put in. Neither cost of living nor and resource calculations (both of which are dependent on algorithms which are supposed to be embedded in the calculator) were included.
We figured this out because we know the algorithms. Would a student be able to understand this? I doubt it. How many thousands of students are now approaching the coming student year with unrealistic expectations about their student aid eligibility? For a government that bangs on about educational planning, to put such inaccurate data in the public sphere is simply irresponsible.
If this were Canlearn’s only problem, I might attribute it to a random goof-up. But the Canlearn calculator is actively dangerous in another way. After you put in all your information, it spits out two numbers: your financial need, and your loan amount. We kept trying to figure out why the loan would be smaller than the need, until we realized the loan amount being given was only the amount of Canada Student Loan being given out – no mention of the amount of money one might be eligible for from the provinces. Any student going to this site might think they were only going to get 60% of what they were actually entitled to (loans in Canada being divided up – in the main – on a 60-40 basis between the federal government and the provinces).
It’s easy to see what happened here. Some bureaucrat, with the interests of inter-jurisdictional propriety in mind, said to themselves “oh, well, we can only show them what WE in the federal government would give them. Far be it from us to say what the provinces might give the student”. And you know what? Constitutionally, this bureaucrat is probably right. But these calculators are supposed to be for the benefit of students, not governments. And students just don’t care about the colour of the money they receive – they just want to know how much money they can get so they can keep studying.
If HRDC is more concerned about jurisdictional niceties than providing students with helpful information, then it shouldn’t be in the advice-providing business. It should get out, shut down Canlearn and be done with it. At least it wouldn’t be actively misinforming students about their student aid packages.
You want more culprits? How about the design of student aid forms to begin with? Just from the point of view of promoting citizenship, these are an utter disaster. Think about it: student aid forms are the first encounter most young people have with a government bureaucracy. And what do we do? We give them a form which is of comparable complexity to an income tax return only minus the transparency. With income tax, you fill in the form and follow the instruction and you understand how you came to owe the amount of tax you do. With student aid you fill in the form, and the system acts as a giant black box before spitting out an offer of aid several weeks later. If that were your first contact with government, would you be filled with good feelings for the public service? Would you think that government was “there for you”?
Susan Dynarski in the United States has made a cogent point that student aid could be reduced to about three questions with no major loss of accuracy. In Canada, we could probably get it down to about six questions – and if we were prepared to sacrifice a lot of needless micro-equity and tinkering in the system we could probably get it down to four. Making changes like this would make the system quicker, more transparent, and above all, more understandable.
So, Mr. Solberg, since you’re spending $31 million on measures to improve communications to students, let me give you some free, quick advice.
- Stop all your advertising campaigns for CSLP. They’re horrible, don’t communicate anything useful and students make fun of them.
- Forget printing up brochures on the CSLP – they’re meaningless because they only tell students about 60% of their loan packages.
- Ditto your loan calculator: shut it down unless it tells students about their WHOLE aid package, not just the bit paid for by Ottawa (it’s not hard, trust me –provinces manage to tell students about both, there’s no reason you can’t, too). Having it actually calculate need properly would be good, too.
- Burn the current need assessment system to the ground and build it up again from the premise that there should be no more than six questions.
Above all, governments need to remember that they are communicating with young people inexperienced in handling money; websites and brochures and need assessment processes need to be designed with their best interests in mind.
We owe them that.
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