Bait and switch for students
If it wasn’t completely clear that the Ford government excels at obfuscation, then Colleges and Universities Minister Merrilee Fullerton more than proved it when she unveiled a program on Thursday billed as “putting more money back in the pockets of students.” In fact, it will do anything but that. Sure, the government cut tuition fees at Ontario’s colleges and universities by 10 per cent and made most student fees optional.
But at the same time, it cut free tuition for students from lower-income families, made it tougher for students to qualify for grants through the province’s financial aid system, and cut the entire aid program back to the level it was at before the Wynne government introduced the free tuition program in 2016.
That’s not all. Students will have to get more of their aid in loans and less in non-repayable grants. The interest-free period on loans will be cut, along with the six-month grace period students used to have to start paying back loans.
This is all bad news for students. They may pay a bit less up front in tuition, but once they graduate they’ll face the challenge of paying back more debt — and have to pay it back quicker.
At the same time, the quality of higher education they get in Ontario may well suffer. The government has no plans to compensate universities and colleges for the $440 million they will lose once the reduced tuition fees take effect. They’re on their own to figure that out. Fullerton’s tough-love advice to the institutions: “Innovate.” That’s a direction that belies the fact that Ontario’s universities and colleges have already been doing more with less than their counterparts across the country.
Ontario colleges, for example, receive about $2,000 less per student from the government than those in other provinces.
And universities have among the lowest levels of per-student funding in the country, while revenues from tuition and operating grants combined have been flat since 2010.
How will it all play out? With “larger classes and fewer professors,” says New Democrat MPP Chris Glover, a former York University professor.
As for students who took advantage of the free tuition introduced by the Liberals, Fullerton had this to say: “Tuition was never free.”
Really? Tell that to the 230,000 students who had taken advantage of the program since it was announced in 2016. And for a good reason.
The simple fact is that kids who pursue a college or university education are typically from more affluent homes. Under the Liberal plan, they didn’t have to be.
Certainly, there were room for improvements to the program. As the province’s auditor general reported last December, its cost was skyrocketing. Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk found it was on track to be 50 per cent more costly than the Liberals predicted it would be.
Further, she reported, there was no follow-up to make sure it was actually meeting the goal of helping more low-income students attend post-secondary schools.
And it was downright foolish that the Liberal government allowed a third of mature students to qualify for it without proof they needed financial support. But those problems required tweaks to the program, not an axe.
Further, the fact the program cost more than expected could be considered a measure of its success at giving poorer students a helping hand.
Without the free tuition option, it’s likely that some will simply be deterred from even contemplating a still-expensive post-secondary education.
All of these cuts — with no word on the savings they would produce — were made despite the fact that Fullerton acknowledged that “access to good jobs depends on access to a good education,” and the government would be there for those with the “greatest need.”
Those are fine words. But the government’s actions go in entirely the opposite direction.