Immediately after the Ontario government announced it would provide “free” tuition for students with a family income of $50,000 or less, many students currently enrolled in a post-secondary school asked whether the new funding formula would help them.
But the Ontario Student Grant plan won’t be in place until the 2017-18 school year—meaning most students currently enrolled will have to pay more in fees and loans than those who will be in school during that year and beyond.
A petition demanding debt forgiveness was started by a University of Windsor student in response. It received more than 58,000 supporters.
But the chances of debt forgiveness ever reaching students left out of the new grant plan is very unlikely, according to Carleton University economics professor Nicholas Rowe.
Rowe said the province wouldn’t be able to afford the debt forgiveness program at its current spending level.
“The government has either got to borrow to make up for that difference that would have been coming back from the students as they pay off their debt, or they’re going to have to raise taxes,” Rowe said.
Such a program would mean transforming the loans into a “gift,” upending the motive for poorer students to take out loans in the first place, and would be unfair to other students who don’t borrow, he said.
“There [would] be a lot of other students kicking themselves saying ‘Damn it, I wish I’d borrowed $25,000, because then I wouldn’t have had to pay it back,’” Rowe said. “So, it’s a grotesquely unfair system in that it’s a straight gift of $25,000 for the students who applied for debt and zero for anyone who didn’t.”
Rowe added that since college and university students, on average, tend to obtain higher-paying jobs, taxing the population for a debt forgiveness program would be unpopular.
“You’re taxing everyone to give more money to the more successful half of the population,” he said.
The petition called on the government to aid low-income students who have graduated or will be graduating with debt.
The ultimate goal of the petition is to have all the debt forgiven, but also asks the government to “at the very least eliminate the interest on those loans.”
Third-year Carleton University neuroscience student Alyssa Rochefort said she agrees the interest rates should be taken off rather than full debt forgiveness.
“They knew going to school that if they were going to take out a loan they’d have to repay it,” she said. “I understand where they’re coming from because I’ll be in that same situation, but I don’t think they can just not pay it back.”
In a blog post for Higher Education Strategy Associates, education consultant Alex Usher noted the new grant system is in fact “a shuffling of money rather than an infusion of one,” as there’s no new funding for the grant plan.
He warned that although the alterations have been marketed by the Liberals as “free tuition,” the changes really mean the grants are getting bigger and covering a greater percentage of tuition only for students who really need it.
Rochefort said she would be willing to sign the petition in spite of her doubts that it will be successful.
“I think they should keep pushing it,” Rochefort said. “Even if they lower it by a bit or do something with the interest rates, anything they can do would help so many people.”
