The ongoing student fight for OSAP reform is opening up promising results. Since June 2002, student representatives from SAC (Student Administrative Council), APUS (Association of Undergraduate Students) and GSU (Graduate Students’ Union) came together with members of U of T’s administration to review the components and conditions of the current Ontario Students Assistance Plan.
After heated debates and long deliberations, both sides reached one conclusion: There are fundamental flaws with the existing plan. In order to make it more responsive to U of T students’ actual needs, both sides have cooperatively come up with a list of 13 recommendations, reflecting the demands of students for a more efficient, up-to-date financial assistance plan.
“The agreed reforms outlined by the students and the administration are necessary and very important improvements to OSAP,” says U of T Vice President Sheldon Levy. “I am very pleased that we could set aside where we differ and together develop this document that emphasizes the issues where there is full agreement.”
The recommendations, which are to be handed over to the newly elected provincial government for review on Oct. 2, deal with a broad range of issues. For example, currently OSAP does not provide financial assistance to part-time students. The first recommendation on the list states that OSAP should be accessible to students regardless of the amount of courses they are taking. Another issue on the list is the standard living allowance that OSAP currently provides for Ontario students. SAC Vice President Operations Alexandra Arful-Dodger says that OSAP has neglected the fact that different places in Ontario are more costly to live in than others. Therefore, she says, OSAP should grant students with money that reflects the real cost of living. As recommendation #2 states, “rent, transportation, and other costs clearly vary in different communities in Ontario.”
Other recommendations on the list include increasing OSAP maximum grants (which were last increased in 1994), increasing child care allowance, revising the parental contribution formula, and more.
Graduate Student Union Governor Francoise Ko says that the newly released recommendations are a success. “We [the students and the administration] had worked on this reform together to demonstrate to the government that here is an issue that we all agree on,” says Ko. “OSAP has to meet the cost of living in a metropolis such as Toronto for it to be effective because in its present form OSAP does NOT reflect the actual cost of living students face in Toronto.”
