An analysis of the grant

Students are excited to see the government taking concrete steps to address the mounting cost of post-secondary education and to ensure that low-and middle-income students are able to attend. Students have long called for a tuition fee reduction and are pleased that the government has committed $430 million dollars to provide a grant for some students.

However, students hope to work with the Ontario government to improve the policy. We are concerned that the tuition fee grant will exclude students who need it the most, is inadequate at assessing need, will be expensive to administer, will be difficult to implement at an institutional level and will fail to bring more access to the sector in the way that the government intends.

We want to ensure that government policy has the goal of addressing inequality in access to post-secondary education. To this end, we have created this document to begin a process of collaboration to improve the policy together. We hope that such collaboration will result in the implementation of a policy that both students and policy-makers can be pleased with for September 2012.