The Ontario election is underway, and all of the major political parties have now put forward proposals to change the tuition or student aid systems to enhance the affordability and accessibility of post-secondary education. Since different tuition and student aid plans have been announced, there has been a lot of misinformation concerning how exactly the proposals will affect students, with a number of commentators publishing inaccurate speculation.

This blog is meant to provide a more accurate description of the parties' proposals. In the months leading up to the campaign, we have been working with all of the major parties on their commitments to post-secondary education. We have gathered the following details through discussions with representatives from each party.

Click to read the full post on OUSA's website:

 

More than nine in ten Ontarians believe post-secondary education is important to the economic prosperity of the Province, according to a recent poll. The majority of respondents are concerned about the cost of college and university for students and are willing to pay more in taxes to address this.

The poll, conducted by Abacus Data Inc., was commissioned by the College Student Alliance and the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance as part of the It's Your Vote campaign to engage students and the public about the importance of post-secondary education to the October 6th election.

"Making higher education more affordable is a clear priority for Ontario's voters," says David Coletto, Chief Executive Officer of Abacus Data. "Several of Ontario's political parties have already addressed this concern to varying degrees through their platforms, and this survey suggests they would fare well to continue building on this."

As found in the study, over 70% of parents are worried about their ability to help pay for their children's post-secondary education, and 68% of Ontarians think that the cost of tuition prevents some willing students from attending. Over half of those surveyed agreed they would be willing to pay more in taxes to reduce tuition fees and improve student aid.

"Post-secondary education is top of mind for students, but this poll clearly shows it is also a priority for Ontarians," added Coletto.

The results of this study are based on a poll of 1,002 Ontarians over the age of 18 conducted between September 9 and 12, 2011. The margin of error for a sample of this size is +/- 3.2 percentage points within a confidence interval of 95%.

As you could probably imagine, September was almost entirely dominated by the Ontario provincial election. It has been a busy month of media interviews, campus visits, and a consistent push to get students informed and out to the polls on October 6th. Our It's Your Vote campaign with the College Student Alliance has been very successful, and we've been particularly pleased that all of the major political parties have engaged with students to make meaningful platform commitments to post-secondary education. We're also happy that our work with Elections Ontario has made it significantly easier for students to vote this time around.

We had a chance to meet and work with our fantastic volunteers at OUSA's Volunteer Training Workshop at Western last week. I also sat on a panel at a conference on differentiation of universities, in which a wide ranging conversation took place on university funding and incentives, credit transfer and quality.

October is going to be an exciting month. No, scratch that, it's going to be a VERY exciting month. I'm so excited about it I'm capitalizing whole words, which is normally a practice I thoroughly discourage. Why am I so excited? Well, for starters we'll be launching our Ontario Post-Secondary Student Survey. We'll have an Ontario-wide data set on student financial assistance and student satisfaction to help support our advocacy agenda for the upcoming year. We've received research ethics approval from a number of institutions and expect the survey to launch on the 18th of October. Additionally, I'm excited for our upcoming releases on cost inflation, ancillary fees and tuition. Much of my month has been consumed with gaining a greater understanding of the landscape of ancillary fees in the province, both compulsory and non-compulsory. The rules created almost twenty years ago are showing signs of age for both students and institutions. With General Assembly just on the horizon, a new government mere hours away and a sector on the brink of change it has never been more exciting to be working at OUSA, or in this field in general. 

September was a busy month, with the election gearing up and campus visits starting. I continued to collaborate with Sean, Natalie, Luke and Kristen on the System Growth policy paper for the fall General Assembly, and am happy to report that it is in the final stages. In addition, at OUSA training day at Western the Campus Research Council had an opportunity to meet and discuss the research projects we want to accomplish this year. Some of these include a campus-audit of daycare costs, gathering information on healthcare and counselling services, and keeping track of new ancillary fees. During this month we also held consultations at Western and Windsor on our Aboriginal Students policy paper. Many thanks to the Aboriginal students who participated for their insightful feedback and commentary on our policy. Finally, preliminary work has started on the Student Health paper for the spring General Assembly, and I am excited about working with a number of on-campus researchers to put together a comprehensive paper.