Overview

Abstract (English)

The Canada Millennium Scholarship Program was established with a $2.5 billion endowment in 1999, with the goal of distributing all its capital for the purposes of student financial aid between 2000 and 2010. The goals of the program were to increase access to post-secondary education, especially among students facing economic and social barriers, and to reduce student debt. This paper examines whether there is any evidence that the first of these goals was met, drawing on statistics on post-secondary enrolments and persistence, and examining the likely distributional effects of the bursaries. There is reason to think on theoretical grounds that the bursaries – which were primarily paid in the form of a reduction in student debt, and therefore primarily increased resources to students only once they were in repayment of their student loans (after leaving PSE) – that the effects of the CMSF bursary program would not have been very large. On the other hand, data on post-secondary participation shows there was a substantial increase in university enrolments and perhaps in some increase in university persistence after 2000. Unfortunately, it is impossible to attribute this to the CMSF bursary program because of the unusual way the program was implemented. It is unlikely that there is any reliable way to evaluate the effects on enrolments of the CMSF bursary program, even if more informative data were available.

Abstract (French)

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