Fears Ontario's student aid program will bring huge debt, put higher education out of reach

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."

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."