OUSA

When the Ontario government extended its current tuition framework last year to the end of the 2011-12 academic year, it was understood that a new framework would be considered for implementation in 2012-13. The current framework allows for each institution to increase their overall tuition fees for domestic students by 5% annually with differentiated increases by program and year of study. With the expectation of consultations on the new framework coming after the October election, OUSA’s General Assembly tasked the organization this past Sunday with reviewing its tuition policy and submitting proposed recommendations to the next meeting of the Assembly in October. As a result, part of our weekend in Kingston was spent in breakout groups talking about what students want to see in the next tuition framework.

So it was a timely surprise to see the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario put out its most recent @ Issue Paper on Monday outlining tuition fee policy options for Ontario. The paper discusses the current tuition framework, financial assistance programs and some of the recent research related to accessibility and private rates of return for students. The paper does not make any explicit recommendations but does evaluate four types of tuition frameworks, namely capped fees, capping the share of costs borne by students, constrained deregulation, and full deregulation.

We were encouraged to see HEQCO starting a necessary discussion around tuition fees, given this debate is too often dominated by stakeholders who understandably each have their own special interests in the outcome. As a neutral party able to conduct independent research, more of this type of activity would be welcome. Upon review of the report, we think it did a nice job of framing the tuition framework’s complex relationship between the accessibility of higher education, the revenue needs of colleges and universities, and the public funds available to support both operating grants and student financial assistance. Its revenue projections for the various tuition policy options were also helpful. However, we were left disappointed with several aspects of the paper.

We agree, as the report points out, that discussions around tuition fees should not intentionally exclude research that “runs counter to long-held positions.” So, we were surprised to see what we believe is an overly narrow review of research on the relationship between tuition and accessibility. While it is certainly true and well documented in the report that overall participation and persistence is not greatly affected by increases in tuition, the effect of fees on participation of certain underrepresented groups was not given the attention it deserves. The paper states that “…there are still groups that are underrepresented in [post-secondary education] in Ontario and it is apparent that financial barriers remain part of the explanation.” It also points out that the gap between high- and low-income participation continues to increase. However, the paper makes almost no attempt to evaluate if tuition fees are a factor in this underrepresentation, even though there is considerable Canadian research that supports this contention.

The three principal financial barriers to higher education in the literature are a lack of sufficient funds, debt aversion, and price sensitivity – all of which are intimately related to the price of tuition. According to a 2009 literature review by Social Research and Demonstration Corporation, students most frequently cite financial barriers as a reason for not pursuing post-secondary education, and among the top three reasons for leaving their studies prematurely. A 2007 article by Berger and Motte reports that almost 40% of individuals who never attended a post-secondary program reported finances as a barrier to attending. Unsurprisingly, a Statistics Canada study found youth from lower-income families are three times more likely to report being financially constrained, and after controlling for other factors, youth that report being financially constrained are 30% less likely to participate in university. Furthermore, a 2007 review by de Broucker and Mortimer found tuition increases have a moderate impact on post-secondary education participation in low-income students. Finally, the relatively low take-up rate of OSAP among low-income students cited in the report is not surprising considering that recent research has found between 10% and 30% of students are unwilling to go into debt to pay for post-secondary education and that debt aversion is highest in low-income and Aboriginal students.

This is not to say that overcoming the three primary financial barriers necessitates the elimination of tuition. If there was a well-functioning financial aid system that provided sufficient non-repayable aid to overcome shortfalls in up-front resources and debt aversion, coupled with ample information provided to students about the costs and benefits of higher education, we may be able to overcome many of these financial barriers.  However, our primarily loan-based aid system remains a far ways off from that goal. The report seems to accept at face value that the financial assistance provided in Ontario is sufficient and accurately reflects students’ costs and resources, which is largely acknowledged among financial aid experts to be untrue. The paper excludes any mention of insufficient resources for students in Ontario, despite the fact that 42% of Ontario students have financial need unmet by student assistance programs, with an average unmet need of $1,191 – and that true unmet need is likely much higher due to living costs and parental contributions which vastly underestimate the real needs of students. The report also seems to suggest at times that increasing the amount of information available to students will alone solve these challenges – we would suggest that the ability to take out grants without taking out loans, a lifting of assistance maximums, and increasing the amount of non-repayable aid for these students are necessary and complementary steps.

It is also worth mentioning, given the number of times it comes up in the report, that students have fundamental concerns with the presence of a tuition set-aside program, where students self-fund financial aid through part of their tuition fees. The tuition set-aside program in Ontario has significantly increased the amount of financial aid money available for students, and its overnight elimination would obviously not be a valid course of action. However, we do not think a set-aside is a sustainable solution for increasing access. It is our belief that ensuring access to higher education is a public goal and therefore financial assistance programs should rightly be funded by the public and not by students themselves through inflated fees.

Much of the argument in the paper for why enrolment continues to increase despite tuition increases is the concept of ‘net tuition’ or that the cost of post-secondary education minus various government subsidies is significantly less than the sticker price. ‘Net tuition’ is an academically useful concept in a debate about the private versus public expenditure on post-secondary education; however, it is substantially less useful in a discussion of accessibility. The Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation put it best: “Unfortunately, for students and families thinking about whether they can afford higher education (especially low-income families), it is not clear that the [net tuition] concept is all that useful. Discussions of net tuition do not focus on when and how tuition is paid… Policy efforts that, by intention or effect, reduce net price are undermined if they do not also affect the perception of post-secondary costs.” It is not clear to students prior to attending post-secondary education how financial aid and post-secondary tax credits will reduce the financial costs, and many low-income students and families do not have sufficient taxable income to make use of tax credits until well after graduation. Even the government has recognized through its 2007 platform that funds for post-secondary tax credits could be better spent, and students will continue to advocate for the elimination of these credits to reduce students’ actual up-front costs. Furthermore, a full report on tuition options should at the very least consider the role that the sticker price of tuition has on access and students’ decisions, regardless of the financial aid systems in place.

Turning to the report’s proposed options for the future, the report largely dismisses rolling back or freezing fees due to the revenue that would be required. Tying increases to the status quo of 5% or to the Consumer Price Index is then discussed, as is the idea of establishing a ‘share’ or proportion of the cost that should be borne by students through fees (a model that OUSA has supported in recent years). The paper also proposes an option of ‘constrained deregulation’ in which fee increases by program are no longer regulated, but the overall increase remains capped. We would like to reiterate students’ disapproval of such a scheme. This would no doubt drive large-scale increases in professional and second-entry programs and result in the same sort of accessibility outcomes noted in the report (namely that financial aid programs and assistance maximums would fail to make up the difference for these students and that tuition fees would negatively affect program choice among students from low-income families). The final option discussed is full deregulation, which for obvious reasons is not an option that students would ever consider viable for an accessible public education system.

We were also concerned with the overall tone of the report, which suggests at times that the province’s current deficit will likely preclude increased government funding beyond increases for growth at current per-student levels. It unreasonably assumes that the ability of students to increase their financial contribution to post-secondary education is essentially limitless, while taxpayers’ contribution is completely constrained. The report also gave absolutely no consideration to the idea of free tuition, despite the number of students, faculty members, public at large and Ontario MPPs of all stripes that consider free or significantly reduced tuition fees a worthy long-term goal. Tuition fees could be nearly eliminated for first-entry students with a single point increase in the provincial rate of the HST or a reversal of the recent provincial corporate tax cuts. Those sorts of choices obviously have broader economic and political ramifications; however, considering the importance this government has placed on access to higher education, we think it remains worthwhile for the sector to engage in such a dialogue when considering tuition models.

There is also the built-in assumption in the report’s analysis that revenue for institutions must continue to increase at or close to the current rate. As the report points out though, inflation in the sector and particularly average annual salary increments over many years have “outpaced inflation by a considerable margin.” We suggest that a continuation of this trend on the backs of students alone is neither fair nor necessary. Students understand that they will have to sacrifice financially to secure a high quality higher education, but the public purse and those that work within the sector should not be automatically sheltered from that burden.

To put it more simply, our fundamental question is are we content with the proportion of post-secondary costs borne by students continuing to increase over the next five years? Over the last three decades, that proportion has increased from 19% to around 45%, a shift in costs unique among provincially-funded services. Should consideration not be paid to the fact that Ontario remains near the bottom of Canadian provinces in per-student funding for our institutions? Is this continued downloading a practice that Ontarians are happy with?

OUSA has long advocated for a 2-to-1 cost sharing model based on the belief that there is both a public and private benefit to higher education that should be recognized in the revenue contributions. Students plan to evaluate this position over the coming months in preparations for the expiring tuition framework. We want to thank HEQCO again for its important contribution to this dialogue, and we hope that it can spark the government and the sector as a whole to continue to debate, reconsider long-held positions, and ultimately decide to do what is best to build an accessible, affordable and high-quality post-secondary system in Ontario.

-Alexi White, OUSA Executive Director
-Sam Andrey, OUSA Director of Research & Policy Analysis

OUSA Spring General Assembly Delegation

This past weekend OUSA held its annual Spring General Assembly, hosted this time by the Alma Mater Society of Queen’s University. Sixty student leaders from across Ontario were on hand for three days of thoughtful debate and discussion about the future of higher education in Ontario.

After delegates arrived on Friday and settled in, we welcomed the weekend’s first guest speaker, Janice Hill, Director of the Four Directions Aboriginal Centre at Queen’s. Jan spoke passionately about her experiences assisting Aboriginal students in need of support and offered her views on how best to increase participation rates from these students. The presentation was exceedingly valuable for future discussions on OUSA’s newly adopted policy on Aboriginal student issues. Following this, delegates discussed OUSA’s 2011 budget submission, OUSA’s recent report on access issues for underrepresented groups, and the forthcoming report on international student issues.

Saturday kicked off strong with a visit from the Hon. John Milloy, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities. After welcoming PC critic Jim Wilson and NDP critic Rosario Marchese to OUSA’s Fall General Assembly, everyone was curious as to what Minister Milloy would say about his government’s record and future plans. After reviewing recent accomplishments on credit transfer and student financial assistance, the Minister discussed some of his priorities for the future, including increasing online learning and promoting greater access to higher education. Delegates then asked some thoughtful questions on issues from university accountability, to education tax credits, to international student tuition and much more. We wish to thank the Minister again for joining us and for taking time out of his Saturday for the long drive from Kitchener to Kingston and back.

Next up was several hours of breakout sessions on policy and strategic direction. In the morning, delegates took turns discussing new policies on Aboriginal students, student success, and ancillary fees. In the afternoon, we discussed future policy goals, provincial election strategy, and the next provincial tuition framework. The discussions were fruitful thanks to the hard work of our Steering Committee members leading the discussions and the willingness of delegates to engage in-depth with the issues and make their voices heard.

Over a break for lunch we welcomed our third guest speaker of the conference, Wendy Vuyk of the Kingston branch of Pathways to Education. As Jan had done the day before, Wendy shared her experiences working with disadvantaged youth in the Kingston area and opened many eyes to the tremendous personal challenges these students face. Wendy also described the four pillars of the Pathways program and the unique challenges of applying these pillars to the Kingston community. The program there is still in its infancy, but the future looks a lot brighter for the youth lucky enough to be part of it.

The final day featured a productive plenary session, which saw the adoption of all three policy papers: Aboriginal students, student success, and ancillary fees. The session was full of debate over motions, amendments, and discussion topics. Each of the policies was discussed one final time with many unique and thoughtful comments about the principles, concerns and recommendations of each paper.

Many thanks must be extended to the hosts: Queen’s Alma Mater Society, who raised the bar with this conference. Their leadership and organization was excellent, and the events and facilities could not have been better.

In the end, 60 students from across Ontario spent a weekend trying to better the post-secondary education system in Ontario, and guide OUSA towards continued excellence in its advocacy, research and communications. Friendships were certainly made and, most importantly, the Alliance left renewed and strengthened.

-Alexi White
OUSA Executive Director

At Brock University, with the threat of a potential work stoppage looming in the air, tensions are running high amongst the undergraduate population. CUPE 4207, representing part-time instructors, teaching assistants, lab demonstrators, and grade markers, has set a strike deadline for this Monday on March 14^th. Many undergraduate students have shifted the focus of the debate from the strike to improving the quality of education at Brock University and ensuring the protection of the seminar system.  Students strongly believe that Brock’s exemplary seminar system provides a high quality learning environment and are upset with what they believe to be the deterioration of this system due to budgetary restrictions.

I believe that both the university administration and CUPE 4207 are working in the interest of students, and I am hopeful that a compromise will be reached. The lack of sufficient funds at Brock University has put both the university administration and CUPE 4207 between a rock and a hard place.

It is a tough time for Ontario, and in light of the recent recession and the increases in enrolment in post secondary institutions across Ontario, it is vital that the provincial government make university funding a priority. We look forward to the government’s forthcoming five-year plan for post-secondary education, and I am hopeful that there will be sufficient funding increases to maintain and improve the quality of higher education in Ontario.

-Daud Grewal
VP University Affairs
Brock University Students’ Union

This Friday the Alma Mater Society is pleased to welcome the OUSA delegations from Windsor, Waterloo, Western, Wilfrid Laurier, McMaster, and Brock to Queen’s University.  This weekend the AMS has the pleasuring of hosting the Spring General Assembly for OUSA.  On Friday over 50 delegates will arrive to debate policy topics, provincial campaign strategies, and OUSA’s vision for the 2011-2012 year.

The policy papers coming forward this week include Ancillary Fees (costs students pay outside of their tuition), Student Success, and Aboriginal Education.  Among the discussions that will be held over the three day conference are future policy papers for OUSA, a year in review, and the upcoming provincial election.

On Saturday we are honoured to have the Minister of Training, Colleges, and University, John Milloy, address the delegation.  Minister Milloy will be speaking to the delegates about the future of education in Ontario and the current Government’s efforts to ensure an accessible and high quality education to every willing and qualified student in Ontario.

The weekend also gives the Alma Mater Society a wonderful opportunity to showcase Queen’s University and Kingston.  The conference is held on campus and showcases our student services as well as the beautiful architecture and academic atmosphere of campus.  Kingston is renowned for the multitude of restaurants and local attractions and delegates will have a chance to experience a small sliver of what the city has to offer in between policy debates and setting OUSA’s vision.

Chris Rudnicki, Vice-President University Affairs, and I welcome the delegates of OUSA Spring General Assembly 2011 and look forward to a weekend filled with intellectual debate and camaraderie.

-Kieran Slobodin
Academic Affairs Commissioner
The Alma Mater Society, Queen’s University

Colour Me Educated

Colour Me Educated, otherwise known as CME at the University of Waterloo’s Federation of Students, is one of the most rewarding things I have been a part of this year. Simply put, CME is our campaign to raise awareness around educational issues that are currently facing the post-secondary education sector. We support an amazing charity called Pathways to Education Kitchener which is a great group of people who are trying to help high school students in local neighbourhoods make it to post-secondary education. The students who Pathways are helping come from groups where PSE participation rates are low and these students don’t attend PSE for reasons no fault of their own.

This campaign is trying to get students to discuss issues like access and the fact that not having parents who went to PSE is often the number one barrier preventing those students from attending. We do not want the conversation to stop at access alone though, as topics like student financial assistance, cost sharing models and teaching quality are all very important topics that are discussed as well.  We want students to be aware of these facts so they can work together to come up with solutions to these complex problems.

To launch the CME campaign, we took a risk on a strange idea: stick 7 student leaders into a cleaned out garbage dumpster and set a fundraising target that must be meet for them to be released. The idea was amazing and worked perfectly. I would know since I was stuck in the dumpster for 3 hours as we raised well over $1,200 for Pathways to Education.  I was blown away by the response and have learned the willingness of students (who themselves don’t have a lot of financial resources to spare) to help local high school students who they might never meet. The students who donated that day either wanted to help a friend or appreciated the fact that a university education has opened many doors for them that would otherwise not be there.

Other campaign events include a balloon drop and silent auction, and concludes with the Paint Drop. President Hamdullahpur, other senior administrators and the Federation of Students executive will be dumped with paint in the colour of the faculty that raises the most money through the campaign. The fact that students have been willing to so generously support an organization that is doing tremendous work at opening up access to higher education for the local community is amazing. I’m looking forward to the conclusion of the campaign – it has already been something I will never forget.

-Nick Soave
VP Education, University of Waterloo Federation of Students

Today is International Women’s Day, or International Womyn’s Day if you prefer. This is a particularly fitting day to recognize the challenges women face in higher education and the labour market. While many people tend to situate the struggles women face for liberation either in a remote, historical past, or in the distant “non-Western” parts of the world, it is important to recognize the ways that gender inequality continues to permeate and affect our society in the here and now.

Over the past year, much has been made of the achievement gap of males in secondary school academic performance and in accessing post-secondary education. While not to detract from this important area of inquiry, I would like to point to several factors which significantly complicate the straightforward narrative of boys struggling and girls excelling:

1.  Males are less likely to apply to university, but not less likely to be accepted, leading  scholars to  theorize that a lack of motivation in secondary school impacts male participation in post-secondary education, particularly university. It has further been theorized that this is connected to better labour market outcomes for males than females with a high school diploma. Males without any post-secondary education are more likely to find stable full-time jobs, with higher rates of pay, than their female counterparts.

2.  At a micro-level analysis of post-secondary education, both genders are underrepresented in certain fields. Women are more likely to receive credentials in the services and nurturing fields, including health and education, as well as the social sciences and humanities. Women continue to be strongly underrepresented in industry, engineering, non-biological sciences and management.

3.  A recent study hypothesized that “traditional societal and cultural beliefs about gender differences in abilities and interests may be factors that continue to constrain the early choices of career direction made by youths, both male and female.”

4.  Certain subgroups of women are less likely to enrol in post-secondary studies, namely those with dependants and other family obligations. Studies have shown that family responsibilities, marriage and parenting tend to affect women’s enrolment and success in post-secondary studies, but are generally insignificant in an analysis of male participation.

5.  Approximately 10 per cent of university students and nearly 30 per cent of Aboriginal post-secondary students report caring for a dependent child. The vast majority of these are female. Only fourteen of the 20 universities in Ontario provide childcare on campus, while only eight of which offer infant care. Wait times for these daycare facilities are frequently longer than a year, and limited funding is available to student parents to subsidize the cost of daycare. Many facilities could not provide a precise wait time, making it difficult for student parents to plan for future enrolment.

These five factors, gleaned from a number of sources, point to several barriers some women face to equitable participation in post-secondary studies. The ones that I think are most important to comment on are the ways that traditional gender roles constrain the choices of male and female students, and also the disproportionate burden for childcare. I have sat through secondary school tutor training sessions where the person leading the session has discussed how “girls are bad at math”.  Attitudes like this are poorly informed generalizations that de-motivate students, erode their confidence, and ultimately deter them from pursuing particular fields of studies. It is critical that at the primary and secondary level boys and girls are both presented a variety of career options in a non-gender biased way.  In addition, we live in a society where the primary burden for childrearing continues to lie with the female parent. It is important to recognize the unbalanced gender implications this has at the post-secondary level, and ensure that students with dependants have adequate support networks so that they feel encouraged in their decision to pursue higher education, and can succeed in completing their course of studies.

While we have come a long way in fostering gender equity in Canadian society, there still is a long way to go.  To contribute to a healthy society as a whole, for women, men, and all genders in between, it is important to continue to critically evaluate the position of women in post-secondary education, and identify areas for improving their enrolment and success.

-Laura Pin
OUSA Research Analyst

The Prime Minister announced Thursday that the federal government is providing $20 million over four years to support the Pathways to Education program. The announcement fulfills a commitment the government originally made in the 2010 Budget. Students in Ontario fully support further investment in this very successful program and commend the federal government for recognizing the long-term benefits it will have on Canadian youth and society.

Pathways to Education is an award-winning charitable organization focused on reducing poverty by helping youth access a higher education. It was started in the Regent Park area of Toronto in 2001 where it has substantially reduced secondary school drop-out rates from 56% to below 10% and significantly increased post-secondary participation among youth in the local community. A report by the Boston Consulting Group estimated that the Regent Park program provided a return on investment of $25 for every dollar invested and a cumulative lifetime benefit to society of $400,000 for each graduate.

With additional funding from the Ontario government, the United Way, the private sector, and now the federal government and other provinces, Pathways to Education has expanded to ten additional communities including seven in Ontario (Lawrence Heights, Rexdale, Scarborough, Hamilton, Kitchener, Ottawa, Kingston), as well as Verdun, Halifax and Winnipeg in three other provinces. It now reaches about 3,400 students in Canada.

In 2007, the Ontario government was the first to step up and provide $19 million over four years to Pathways so the program could expand to communities outside of Regent Park. With those four years now behind us, Ontario students are hopeful that the forthcoming budget will include a renewed investment to allow the program to continue its great work and hopefully expand to more communities across the province. While the Province is facing a substantial deficit, the Premier’s Open Ontario Plan has prioritized greater participation in higher education, and the Pathways program clearly delivers.  As the Premier said in 2007, “No matter what kind of start they have had in life, or their circumstances, Ontario’s young people deserve to have every opportunity to succeed.”

For more information on Pathways to Education, check out their website. For more on how this program and other community-based early outreach programs are needed to increase post-secondary participation rates among underrepresented groups, read Breaking Barriers, a comprehensive access strategy created by OUSA and our partners at the College Student Alliance and Ontario Student Trustees’ Association.

-Saad Aslam
OUSA VP Finance
VP University Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier Students’ Union

On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, we had the opportunity to attend the Aboriginal Postsecondary Education Gathering, hosted by the Ontario government through the Aboriginal Education Office. This two-day conference brought together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students, support staff, community members, institutional representatives, and government officials to share information and learn from each other. From listening to the thoughts and opinions of a number of diverse groups, including an Aboriginal student panel, a panel of Aboriginal Elders, government ministers, support staff at Aboriginal centres, and representatives from Aboriginal-managed post-secondary institutes, a number of common themes emerged.

One theme that seemed to weave throughout the Gathering was the concept of a bi-cultural education. As a sector, we cannot merely seek to remove access barriers for Aboriginal students. We must also seek to educate non-Aboriginal students in a serious way about First Nations, Métis, and Inuit culture, history, and philosophy. The student panel at the conference made it quite clear that they thought it unfair that they were expected to learn dominant cultural norms, but that there was no converse expectation for their non-Aboriginal counterparts. Another concern was that this lack of a reciprocal cultural awareness contributes to the racism, discrimination, and general misinformation that exists in Canadian society about Aboriginal peoples.

While the state of bi-cultural education varies by institution, it is clear that the trend is that where Aboriginal cultures and values are discussed, they tend to be taken as cultural curiosities rather than as having serious value in their own right. If we are to truly create post-secondary institutions that serve the needs of Aboriginal students (as well as non-Aboriginal students), we must create an environment that does not merely meet the minimum standard of including and tolerating Aboriginal perspectives, but rather prioritizes and respects Indigenous knowledge on equal footing with non-Indigenous worldviews.

Another theme that was repeatedly emphasized throughout the gathering was the need for adequate funding for Aboriginal students at all levels of their education. At one of the sessions, a woman who works as a counsellor in an Aboriginal community described how there still exists a discrepancy in the funding allocations for Aboriginal students who attend band schools and those who attend provincial schools, and that this discrepancy contributes to gaps in student performance at the secondary level and preparation for post-secondary studies. When asked to prioritize one change in Aboriginal education in Ontario, the members of the Aboriginal student panel ubiquitously replied “increased funding.” This was echoed in Roberta Jamieson’s phenomenal keynote address during which she declared that the number one barrier to post-secondary education for Aboriginal students is financial resources. She also challenged the provincial and federal government to commit to matching private funds raised by the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, to ensure that no Aboriginal student is denied access to post-secondary education due to a lack of funds. While we believe that adequate support services and the integration of Aboriginal perspectives into post-secondary curriculum are also important steps in bridging the attainment gap, increased non-repayable financial assistance through both the federal and provincial government is clearly necessary for more Aboriginal students to pursue post-secondary studies.

Given the emphasis on a bicultural education and working together to fund Aboriginal education, it is deeply appropriate that the tagline of the Aboriginal Postsecondary Education Gathering was “learning from each other.” We were heartened by the tremendous attendance at the conference, and the overall commitment to learning from each other in order to move toward closing the attainment gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Ontarians. Given the sprit of the conference, however, it was disappointing that a number of government representatives had to leave immediately after addressing the attendees. Similarly, a number of sector stakeholders were absent from the gathering and missed the chance to learn and contribute, for instance during the panel of Elders. These Elders and Senators spoke deeply and movingly about their personal experiences with education, as youth themselves and also with youth today. In many cases, they shared emotional encounters with the group gathered about experiences in residential schools, personal challenges, successes of youth today, and emphasized the importance of Aboriginal language and cosmology. We are extremely thankful to these people for committing to sharing their knowledge with us, and believe that value of consultations with Aboriginal communities, and Elders in particular, cannot be understated if the government is to effectively address the post-secondary attainment challenges of Aboriginal communities.

We want to thank the government for hosting us over the two days for what was a powerful, informative and thought-provoking Gathering. We look forward to continuing to collaborate on next steps for closing the attainment gap and supporting our Aboriginal learners in Ontario’s post-secondary institutions.

-Chris Rudnicki
VP University Affairs, Alma Mater Society, Queen’s University

-Laura Pin
OUSA Research Analyst