The flip side of Ontario tuition grants

To ring in the new year, Ontario's government cut $42 million in funding for research projects, while simultaneously introducing an undergraduate tuition grant that will cost $423 million a year — to start. The funding changes come during a provincial fiscal crisis, with the government looking to reduce public service costs in as many sectors as possible.

The cuts to research, which were targeted at the Ontario Research Fund (ORF) for programs in the sciences, arts, and humanities, were met with disappointment. However,  the "30 percent off" Ontario tuition grant, which would see eligible university students receive $1600 per year toward their tuition, also has its detractors.

As NDP Critic for Training, Colleges, and Universities Teresa Armstrong pointed out, "The grant is only for some students. The [Liberal] platform said they would reduce tuition for students—not just some. Mature students, students in professional programs [...] it's excluding certain classes of students."

Armstrong also referred to the phasing out of the Textbook and Technology Grant and the Queen Elizabeth II Aiming for the Top scholarship. She suggested that other post-secondary grants are being axed to fund the new rebate, which raised the question of other funding later being cut to meet the rising costs of the 30 percent grant.

The government's promise is to provide 30 percent of annual tuition costs, meaning the grant's value will rise with tuition costs. But the Council of Ontario Universities' (COU) senior director of Policy and Analysis, Peter Gooch, doubts that other education funding will be cut in order to continue financing the new rebate.

"At this point we simply don't know what the [future] cuts to other programs will be," he said. "But it's highly unlikely that they will cut benefits to students under OSAP." These benefits include both loans and non-repayable grants.

"This is a huge amount of money," Gooch continued. "But it's not a situation where the government is going to try to match dollar for dollar — where we cut one [education] program to fund another."

Gooch pointed out that because of the fiscal situation many services will have to face cuts, but added that so far the government is prioritizing education, "as shown by this commitment." He also noted that the grant is supposed to ease the way for students "transitioning" between high school and postsecondary, with mature or returning students not falling under that category.

The tuition grant helps students in a still-weak economy, but the impact of the coinciding cuts to research isn't as straightforward. The grants and cuts follow recent trends in Ontario's post-secondary policies, as the government focuses on increasing the number of university students without ensuring that the quality of their learning experience does not continue to deteriorate.

One such trend is a greater emphasis on teaching and a corresponding shift away from research projects, even though faculty research projects often allow keen undergraduate students to engage with their chosen fields. Some of the ORF's reallocated funding was targeted toward the special rounds of social sciences, arts, and humanities programs (an exact figure was not yet available) but a large part of it was also for what COU senior director of Strategic Initiatives Robbin Tourangeau calls "research that ties directly to the industry."

"This particular fund was very focused on economic development, working [...] to find solutions in the here and now, in the short term. All the projects had industry partners." Tourangeau then explained why the impact of the cuts is heavier than it seems.

"The way [the fund] was set up was that the province provided one third of the funding and the industry and institutions provided the other two thirds. So for every dollar funded by the government, industry partners match with two dollars." That would take the $42 million in cuts up to a much higher number, lost through leverage.

Part of the frustration with these cuts has to do not just with the amount but the timing. "Rounds six and seven in the programs had already been launched. And it takes a lot of effort for these proposals to be written up [...] so we're sorry that these were cut and we're also sorry that these were cut mid-round."

Nevertheless, Tourangeau adds, "we're  looking forward to working with [the government] on funding changes in the future."