Hello all,
August is the last stretch of quiet before the year starts in earnest. Move-in dates get confirmed, tuition invoices arrive, and students sit down to figure out whether the numbers actually work for the year ahead. On our end, it has been a month of finishing what we started over the summer and finding our footing for September.
This month we had the chance to sit down with MPP Aislinn Clancy (Kitchener Centre), Deputy Leader of the Green Party of Ontario, which rounds out our summer of meetings with MPPs from across the Legislature. We covered a lot of ground: work-integrated learning, where she shared the youth-focused job experience programs she has been championing; cost of living and housing, an area where she has done considerable legislative work and continues to hold tenant town halls for young people here in Waterloo Region; and OSAP, where she was receptive to our recommendations and interested in the preliminary findings from our summer student survey.
Alongside the political meetings, we spent time this month with two partners who shape this work in a different way. We met with the Council of Ontario Universities to compare notes on where the sector is heading and where our interests line up. We also met with the operational team at the Ministry of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security (MCURES), following up on our conversation with Minister Quinn in July. We had a generative conversation connecting on our advocacy priorities and their projects for the upcoming school year. We look forward to more conversations in the fall.
Our Steering Committee met in August, and we followed it the next day with OUSA's Sector Stakeholder Day on August 21st. We brought the Council of Ontario Universities (COU), the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), eCampusOntario, and the Ontario Council on Articulation and Transfer (ONCAT) into the same room with our student leaders. Everyone there wants a post-secondary system that works, and everyone there sees a different part of it. Getting those perspectives around one table, in front of the students who live with the outcomes, is exactly the kind of relationship-building that pays off later in the year when we are all trying to move the same file.
The other headline of the month came on August 1st, when the new OSAP structure came into effect. Students are now eligible to receive up to 25 percent of their provincial funding as grants and up to 75 percent as loans, arriving alongside the end of the tuition freeze. OUSA released a statement that same day setting out our concerns and, just as importantly, what we are asking the government to do about them: a no-interest provincial student loan program modelled on the federal initiative, an extension of the six-month repayment grace period to at least two years, and clarity for students and families on how the Student Access Guarantee will actually work in practice. We recognize the pressure the province is under to keep the program financially sustainable. Our position is that sustainability cannot be built on the backs of the students who have the fewest alternatives when the grant disappears.
I also spent a fair bit of this month talking to the media about what these changes mean. On the day they took effect, I spoke with CTV News about what students were bracing for, and you can watch that interview here. This week I spoke with The Canadian Press for a story on the debt loads students are carrying into September. The point I keep coming back to in these conversations is that this is not only about the next four years. When repayment eats up the income students would otherwise be putting toward a first apartment, a down payment, or starting a family, we are asking a generation to delay the rest of their lives to pay for their education. That is worth saying out loud, and I intend to keep saying it.
This month also saw the release of OUSA's Indigenous Students policy paper. The paper was developed, researched, and written by Indigenous undergraduate student authors, and its principles, concerns, and recommendations were voted on and ratified by delegates from our member schools at Fall General Assembly last October. It takes on the systemic barriers Indigenous students continue to face in Ontario's post-secondary institutions, including but not limited to self-determination and representation, self-identification processes, financial aid and access to university. Reconciliation is not a statement OUSA makes once and moves on from. It is ongoing work, and it means carrying these recommendations into the rooms where decisions get made and holding ourselves to them. I would encourage you to read it in full.
Finally, a thank you to our summer interns, Chavi, Chanice, and Olivia. They have spent the past four months supporting Home Office with research, participant engagement, communications, and policy work. They ran surveys, facilitated focus groups, and asked good questions of the rest of us. Thank you, all three of you. You made this organization better this summer.
Thanks for reading. As always, feel free to reach me at [email protected]
Sincerely,
Rory Norris
President, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA)