Students’ aid policies: a comparative mixed-method study of two federal cases

In the last decades, OECD countries witnessed more than one way of designing students’ aid policies, under a predominant trend of decentralizing their governance. However, this decentralizing process carried the seeds of its own contradictions. The central paradox is that these policies remained multi-issue and multi-actor, making them likely to fall under the double-hand of different governmental levels. Federal countries constitute a laboratory to study the “decentralization experiment” in its absurdity. For this reason, the PhD project proposes a comparison between two federal cases (i.e. the United States and Canada), and in time (between 1930 and 2018), using a mixed-method. The analysis is also extended in a discussion of four embedded deviant case studies (Alaska, New York, Prince Edward Island and Quebec). Albeit usually simplified as paradigmatic cases for liberal, elitist, loan-oriented and tightfisted aid systems, the United States and Canada have proved to be more generous over student aid than what is expected from their respective welfare regime. Nevertheless, behind this engagement, I uncover an intergovernmental contention of powers and responsibilities embedded within deeply rooted federal institutions. With a focus on federal structures and dynamics, I also reveal potential political and economic incentives behind student aid. Beyond the common belief that students’ aid exists solely to help students, the thesis shows how these policies might be more grounded in institutional factors than student- related considerations.