Tayla Genereux, a second-year culinary student, says she considered not returning to college for the 2019-20 year because of concerns about money, but she decided to stay when she found a job last summer. Photo by Liam Radford, QNet News
By Liam Radford
BELLEVILLE – Tayla Genereux is one of many Loyalist College students feeling the pressure after Ontario Student Assistance Program funding decreased in September.
Genereux is a second-year student in the culinary program at Loyalist. In her first year, she said, she relied on OSAP to pay for her tuition and rent. She received more than $5,000 in OSAP grants – money you don’t have to pay back – as well as an OSAP loan that must be repaid.
That was before changes to OSAP by the Ontario government that were implemented as the 2019-20 school year began. Genereux said her grants dropped by $4,000, to only a quarter of her program tuition.
She’s lucky because she saw it coming, she said, but she still felt the stress of wondering what she was going to do.
“At first, yes, it stressed me out like crazy, because I realized I had to get my shit together. Now it doesn’t stress me out as much because I got lucky. I planned and made it work” by getting a summer job.
The stress she felt last year got so bad it caused her health problems and disrupted her studies, she said. “I ended up breaking out in this full-body stress rash because of everything that was going on. I ended up missing school for about a month to a month and a half.”
Alexis Calhoun, a nursing student at Loyalist College, was among student protesters in Toronto last year when the provincial government announced changes to OSAP. File photo by Liam Radford, QNet News
Like Genereux, 73 per cent of Loyalist students were receiving OSAP grants that covered their full tuition last year. The changes by the provincial government for this academic year reduced the number of students eligible to receive grants and made students take more loans.
Laura Russell, Loyalist’s co-ordinator of financial aid, said that in this academic year, Loyalist has 1,994 students receiving some money from OSAP. A specific breakdown of how many of those students receive grants isn’t available, she said.
Russell confirmed that Loyalist students are receiving fewer grants and more loans through OSAP this year. The determination of how much students get in grants and loans is based on financial need and income bracket.
Before the changes that took effect in September, students from families that made up to $86,000 a year could qualify for grants that could fully cover tuition. Some students from families whose income is below $86,000 can still receive grants, but “it’s hard to tell you what the exact (family-income) number is because there’s so many variables when a person is assessed,” Russell explained. “It’s the size of the family. It’s the number of kids in post-secondary. There’s so many variables.”
The changes also scrapped a six-month period after the student completes studies when provincial OSAP loans did not accumulate interest.
Another change announced at the same time was that colleges were required to decrease tuition by 10 per cent.
When these changes were announced, Loyalist students joined their counterparts at colleges and universities across Ontario in protests at Queen’s Park. Genereux was one of these students that went to Toronto to voice concerns that they would not be able to support themselves without OSAP and would be left with large debts.
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