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After a busy fall term, OUSA's member schools and the Home Office are preparing to shut down for a short time and take a much needed holiday break. We look forward to continuing to work with students, the provincial government and other stakeholders to advocate for a more accessible, affordable, and higher quality post-secondary education in 2012.
Wishing you all a refreshing and relaxing break,
Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!
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Happy December everyone! OUSA has just wrapped up our most successful Student Advocacy Conference yet, having had 75 meetings at Queen's Park over the course of 4 days last week. I want to thank everyone involved with the conference for the many productive conversations that were had with MPPs around tuition and quality; your recognition of post-secondary education as critical to the success of the province and its youth is encouraging, and I applaud you for your willingness to engage on these issues.
OUSA also played host to a roundtable with many sector partners last week that drew upon our recently released examination of costing and funding pressures within our universities. The discussion offered great perspectives on how to preserve and enhance quality within post-secondary education while understanding the challenges facing students, institutions and governments alike. We hope that we can continue the same spirit of collaboration and innovation moving forward as we all work to deliver the best experience for Ontario's students.
As things wind down at OUSA and our members, I want to send my most sincere thanks to all we work with, and to extend best wishes for the holiday season. We'll see you all in the new year, where I look forward to getting back to work with renewed vigor.
-Sean Madden |
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Students and parents flock to OUSA.ca for tuition grant information
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Since the announcement of the Ontario Tuition Grant during the Provincial Election, OUSA's website pages outlining details of the program has reached over 10,000 hits. Students and parents have flocked to the website for information, as well as calling and emailing the OUSA office. Everyone is eager to see the program implemented and we are hopeful for a successful launch this coming January.
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Sam Andrey | Executive Director
|  November and December were a government-relations-marathon as the government began its new mandate. In mid-November, the Speech from the Throne outlined the government's new agenda - including several important new initiatives for students. Principal among them is the new Ontario Tuition Grant, which has occupied our time both from a policy and implementation perspective. We had our first meeting with Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities Glen Murray right before we began our successful three-day Student Advocacy Conference. The discussions centred on the new tuition framework, flat-fee tuition and improving teaching quality, all of which were extremely well received by the Legislature. We also hosted a great roundtable discussion with our partners, government and fellow stakeholders in the Ontario post-secondary sector on our recent Rising Costs report and on innovative ways to improve quality in Ontario's universities. Discussions and meetings continued throughout the month on student mental health, improving credit transfer, satellite campus regulation, supporting Aboriginal students, and with the Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services on how to improve the cost sustainability of our universities. I wish everyone a relaxing and happy holidays, and I look forward to continuing to work with all of you in the new year to build a stronger post-secondary education system for the students of Ontario. |
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Alvin Tedjo | Director of Communications
|  Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, Happy Kwanzza, and Festivus for the rest of us =) ...and a Happy New Year! It's always a great time to stop and reflect on the year when the holidays come around, and it certainly has been an exciting year. Here are some of our numbers in 2011: OUSA welcomed two new members, hosted six conferences, four workshops and roundtable discussions, met with over 90 MPPs, had over 81,000 page views on our website, wrote 159 blogs, 300+ tweets, 8,500+ YouTube views, travelled 9,000+ km across Ontario and back, wrote four government submissions, passed seven policy papers at General Assemblies, polled 1,000 Ontarians, surveyed 11,000 students, and represented 145,000 students at nine member associations across Ontario. We also said goodbye to our Executive Director Alexi White, President Meaghan Coker, Research Interns Chris Rudnicki and Kristen Holman. Thank you to everyone for a great year, and I look forward to another great one ahead! |
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Chris Martin | Director of Research
|  As we come to the end of 2011, I've never been prouder of research at OUSA. I've always believed our strength has been investigating issues in higher education avoided by others. Whether questioning the prevailing conclusion that tuition and access are not correlated or examining cost-drivers in higher education, OUSA's role as a student advocacy group has always provided us a specific lens through which to examine issues. While this has some drawbacks, it also has allowed us to come to different conclusions, discover different problems and discuss different ideas in the sector. Ultimately, this allows us to propose outside-the-box solutions that otherwise might go un-proposed. This year, OUSA developed more detailed research on accountability, system growth, tuition, cost-drivers in higher education, teaching quality and a whole host of other issues. In this fiscal climate, it is more important than ever that institutions become more effective at educating students. All of these issue areas will play a part in realizing this goal. I'm particularly excited by the data yielded by our Rising Costs, authored by Laura Pin (and contributed to by Sam and I), since I believe it will provide an excellent springboard for a discussion on how we can leverage current resources to improve quality. I'd like to extend a warm thank you to everyone who has responded to our frequent and numerous requests for data and information, partnered with us on research projects or provided informed feedback. Your commitment is proof that our sector is more united than divided; that we all share the aspiration of a more accessible and high quality university system.
Happy Holidays! I look forward to continuing our work in the new year. |
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Laura Pin | Research Analyst
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Happy December! The last month has been tremendously busy at the OUSA home office. The first week of December, student leaders from OUSA member schools were at Queen's Park to meet with MPPs and raise student concerns about quality of education and the upcoming tuition framework. Last week we also hosted a roundtable on our recent publication Rising Costs to discuss how institutions can improve the quality of education in the face of fiscal constraints. Thank you to all the participants partaking in what was a stimulating discussion. A special thanks goes out to Dr. Joy Mighty from Queen's University for trekking to Toronto to moderate our discussion. I am looking forward to seeing family over the winter break, and hopefully some skiing if the weather will cooperate. Happy Holidays!
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The month of November was dubbed "Stress Month" or rather, "De-Stress Month" at McMaster University. Through a series of workshops, free food, and stress swag, the McMaster Students Union was able to promote OUSA and other external advocacy organizations as a way for students to de-stress about their educational concerns! Last year, stress month started as an idea to promote the Fall Major at McMaster, a show entitled "Stressed!: A Musical Review".
This year, we decided to continue this brilliant idea, and hold "stress rooms" open every Wednesday of the month, where students could come and hear motivational speakers talk about ways to deal with stress, grab a snack, do some yoga, or use it as a quiet study space. Many students made positive comments along the lines of, "This is such a good idea, can we do this every month?" Needless to say, the Advocacy Street Team at McMaster worked very hard to carry out this event, and we were happy that we could use this month as a way of promoting OUSA as an outlet for students to express their educational concerns and subsequently have a little less stress in their otherwise hectic university careers.
-Shivani Persad
McMaster Students Union Advocacy Coordinator
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The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance represents the interests of over 145,000 professional and undergraduate, full- and part-time university students from nine student associations across Ontario.
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Alvin Tedjo
Director of Communications
OUSA | Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance |
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