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The physiotherapist who helped Foday Saidykhan recover from a basketball injury also helped inspire the Toronto teen’s dreams for the future. A summer mentorship program offering the high-schooler a hands-on introduction to a variety of health-care careers and professionals happy to discuss their own schooling further cemented his growing interest in movement and anatomy.
With a subsequent goal set — studying kinesiology at Western University in London, Ont. — Saidykhan got busy: toiling for good grades in prerequisite classes, working as a volunteer and crafting scholarship essays.
The Grade 12 student and his mother, a single parent juggling financial challenges since the COVID-19 pandemic, were counting on the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) after its online estimator predicted the 17-year-old would receive a “healthy grant.”
Yet the dream now feels in jeopardy amid new OSAP changes Ontario unveiled last week.
This coming fall in Ontario, the grant portion of student aid packages will max out at 25 per cent, while the remaining 75 per cent will be a loan. It replaces a model that allowed grants of up to 85 per cent for applicants most in need.
This ratio flip was announced alongside a $6.4-billion boost to universities’ and colleges’ operational funding and the elimination of a years-long tuition freeze (now curbed to an increase of up to two per cent a year for the next three years).
The new measures to help Ontario’s institutions — home to more than 40 per cent of both university and college students in Canada — arrive as the country’s post-secondary sector continues to grapple with the ramifications of the federal international student cap. They’ve also raised concerns about Canada potentially returning to earlier times when unaffordability deterred people from getting a higher education.
“I’m going to have to rethink my plan,” Saidykhan said. “If I want to take more schooling as well after kinesiology … then it’s just going to pile on the loans.”
Ontario is giving colleges and universities billions in new funding, while lifting a seven-year tuition fee freeze and cutting back on the amount of student assistance grants.
Worry about ‘insurmountable’ debt
The flood of student protest emerging after the Progressive Conservative government’s announcement comes as students are already struggling with high costs for housing and food, as well as facing high youth unemployment, said Sayak Sneddon-Ghosal, president of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance and a recent social work graduate from Wilfrid Laurier University.
The prospect of grants becoming loans as of this September has set off alarm bells. Students are worried about “whether or not they’re going to be able to put their foot in the door or keep their foot there if they’re already a student,” he said.
Some fear “they might go into a degree and then come out of it with an insurmountable amount of debt … [and struggle] to pay back that debt — something that they’ll have to deal with for many years down the line.”
Nationally, Canadians haven’t been as outraged over student debt as they were in the 1990s, for example, because at different points over the years, federal and provincial governments improved student financial aid policies — including in the form of tax credits, scholarships and policy shifts that increased grants, said Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates in Toronto.
In Ontario, changes to the OSAP ratio under the previous Liberal governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne meant it became “significantly more generous than the rest of the country,” he said.
“In most other provinces, the loan-grant ratio for the provincial portion of student aid is 4 or 5 to 1. Ontario looked very different than the rest of the country…. Now it’s going to look a lot more similar.”
Changes predicted to impact enrolment
Premier Doug Ford defended his government’s move on Wednesday, saying it puts Ontario “in the middle of the path” among other provinces, adding that “what we were doing was unsustainable.” Taxpayers expect students receiving public funds to choose fields of study that will “drive economic growth,” he said.
Yet Usher said Ontario could have allowed colleges and universities to increase tuition slightly beyond the new two per cent annual cap — but not as high as it was six years ago — and still keep its student aid model.
Instead, he said, the OSAP ratio flip puts a major financial burden specifically on those most in need.
“I don’t think it’s wrong for [Ontario] to say students should pay more. I do think it is wrong for them to say the vast majority of that burden should fall on the one-third of students who are basically the poorest,” Usher said.
“Education is a leveller. It never perfectly levels anything, but we’re making it less able to level by heaping more debt, more of the cost of funding institutions, on students from poorer backgrounds.”
He predicts the average student debt balance will indeed increase — “and that is going to cause people to freak out” — and that the changes will impact future post-secondary enrolment, in particular students going back to school or older, part-time students with families.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is doubling down on his comments around changes to OSAP, saying taxpayers expect students to choose fields of study that will ‘drive economic growth.’
Schools ‘on the same page’ about access
Institutions also have their own student assistance programs, and Canada has “an outstanding higher-education system of colleges and universities” with post-secondary leaders “all on the same page” about wanting a system accessible to a diversity of students, said University of Toronto president Melanie Woodin.
“When you’ve got a diverse community, you’re going to achieve excellence because of the lived experience and the varied views that people bring to the table. If you’re an educator or you’re a scholar and you’re trying to make a new discovery, excellence is going to come from that diversity,” she said.
Woodin touts U of T’s offering — available on top of OSAP — which began in 1998 with a policy guaranteeing financial support for any Canadian or permanent resident accepted by the university to enter or complete their program. That aid has endured thanks to regularly reinvested tuition revenue and ongoing philanthropic donations, she said.
The support, which doesn’t require repayment by students, can be merit- and/or needs-based, helping to cover things like lab supplies, books or even residence. Woodin acknowledged, however, that not every institution can support as extensive a program, since U of T has “financial levers that not all universities have at their disposal.”
Lise Watson, the mother of Toronto teen Foday Saidykhan, said she has also seen Canadian colleges and universities move toward “levelling the playing field” over the decades as she worked in jobs involving student financial aid co-ordination and in departments distributing bursaries and awards.
Yet she fears recent changes will roll back progress and especially limit or deter lower-income families, marginalized communities and newcomers from continuing their education.
With a high youth unemployment rate and uncertainty amid the rise of artificial intelligence and rapid technological change, “for our young people to be burdened with huge debts, it just seems totally unfair and wrong,” Watson said.
