If you live in Ontario, chances are that you’ve heard about the 30% tuition rebate that the Ontario government is offering to most college and university students. Basically, if you’re a full-time undergraduate college or university student in Ontario and your parents make less than $160,000, you get $730 per year if you’re in college or $1600 if you’re in university. The McGuinty government is promoting this program heavily and basically giving themselves a pat on the back for “helping out students”. In fact, they even sent representatives to Guelph to promote the rebate even more to students at my school.
When I first heard about the rebate over the holidays, I thought it was awesome. After all, I welcome more free money with open arms. Who wouldn’t?
The problem is that it when you read the fine print, it isn’t really more free money. In fact, it’s less.
Here are the problems with this program:
1. The rebate is only available to students who have been out of high school for less than four years. This means that students who take more than 4 years to finish their degree, graduate students, and mature students don’t qualify. In fact, in my final year of university, I probably won’t qualify because my program is four and half years long because I have co-op work terms.
2. Students on OSAP (Ontario’s student financial aid program) that receive the Ontario Access Grant won’t receive the rebate if their OAG is more than $1600, or will have the value of their rebate reduced if their OAG is less than that. This means that I personally won’t receive the rebate because my OAG is about $2600. OAG recipients are among the students with the most financial need because the OAG is for students with families that are unable to support them financially. In other words, the students that receive the OAG are the students that need the rebate the most.
3. To fund this rebate, the McGuinty government cancelled 3 other grant programs. One of those grants was the Queen Elizabeth II Aiming for the Top Scholarship, which is a scholarship given to Ontario high school students who graduate with high averages. The value of the scholarship varies from $100 to $3500 based on the student’s financial need, and is renewable for up to 4 years if the student keeps their college/university GPA above 80%. I am a recipient of this scholarship, and I received the full $3500.
The way that the scholarship works is that money that would have been given to you in the form of a loan is given to you as a scholarship instead. So before I received the scholarship, I had about a $6500 loan. When I was approved for the scholarship, my loan was reduced to about $3000 and the other $3500 was now a scholarship (money that I don’t have to pay back). Without the QEII scholarship, I would have over twice the debt that I actually do have.
From what I understand, current QEII recipients will continue to have their scholarships renewed if they meet the 80% requirement. That’s good for me, but incoming post-secondary students will have to take on more debt to fund their education. And $1600 (if they actually get it) is nothing compared to $3500.
4. The McGuinty government recently cut over $42 million in grants to universities. When the government cuts funding to universities and colleges, students take a financial hit because their schools raise tuition to cover the shortfall. Here in Ontario, university students pay the highest tuition fees in Canada while receiving the lowest per-student funding. In the other words, Ontario students are paying more for a lower-quality education. $1600 will be a drop in the bucket if tuition just keeps rising.
The 30% rebate, while initially sounding awesome, does little to address the issue of the rising cost of post-secondary education. The provincial government needs to be investing more in colleges and universities, not cutting funding. It needs to freeze tuition. It needs to be expanding financial aid programs instead of cutting them.
It needs to be doing more than pretending to care about post-secondary students, which is all this rebate amounts to.
This isn’t surprising to me at all, unfortunately. Ontario has the highest tuition in the country. It’s fucking ridiculous; there’s no reason for that. It’s Ontario, for God’s sake! We have 40% of Canada’s population and GDP. Just… ugh. It’s inexcusable.
My out-of-province tuition will be only a few hundred more than if I went to my top choice in Ontario (which is Guelph).
Anyway, this is really shitty. I’m glad you can still renew your scholarship though. That’s a huge amount of money to lose!
As a resident of Ontario, that’s quite unfortunate to hear. In any case, this only further fuels my desire to attend school in the US, even though it is more expensive. Personally, I don’t agree with how universities are run — there are far too many students in one seminar. In addition to tuition, the McGuinty gov’t should focus on better funding institutions of higher learning.