January is winding down, so that means two things on most university campus: executive elections are in full swing and the student financial assistance lines are just starting to look manageable. It is a quiet reminder of the importance of the work done by students across our Province to improve the financial accessibility and affordability of our education system. Unfortunately, as a student executive over the past two years, I have had to have many less quiet reminders of the need to reform Student Financial Assistance in Ontario from students struggling both inside and outside of the Ontario Student Assistance Program.
Yesterday OUSA was proud to announce that the Ontario Association of Financial Aid Administrators endorsed our proposal to modernize OSAP. The fact that stakeholders are agreeing with the OUSA proposal isn’t surprising. The recommendations, as a whole, are a giant step forward towards making OSAP the program that students in Ontario need it to be.
This post, however, isn’t going to focus on the recommendations that OUSA made (you can read those here). What I would like to discuss briefly in this post is consequences associated with gaps in the current system. Primarily what I am talking about is the students who are removed from the OSAP system, have their OSAP withheld from them or are not granted the OSAP they require to make it through a semester.
Every year that I have been involved with student government we are faced with students applying for exceptions to our emergency loan system. Consistently these students are approaching us for two reasons. First, the student emergency loan systems on campuses were set at levels that did not grant them the funds… Second, the students were either removed from the OSAP program or (more commonly) still receiving OSAP, but not quickly enough for them to ensure that they could make sure that their rent was paid and they could buy necessities (books, groceries etc). When these students request exceptions, they are at their last straw: many are struggling to support dependents, work part time jobs and are having difficulties working on their programs of study.
These students are a clear example of a few things. One, we need to modernize OSAP to ensure that all students are provided the resources they require, so that they can focus on being successful students. Second, better resources are required on our campuses to make sure that students are able to get their OSAP quickly without waiting a month (or longer). Finally, we need to make sure that there are safe guards in place, so when a student is struggling, they are not applying for exceptions to rules.
OUSA’s proposal for modernizing student assistance is an incredible step forward for student assistance in Ontario. If implemented, it will definitely improve the situation for students struggling to succeed. It should be noted, however, that this is a step and there is still a lot of work needed.
