Good news!  There is now a litmus test in Ontario to see which interest groups and/or political parties – if any – actually care about expanding access to post-secondary education and which just prefer grandstanding about tuition and/or student aid.  And that test is whether or not anyone will bother to endorse the recommendations put forward by Carleton’s Jennifer Robson in her paper Post-Secondary Access: Better Life Chances for Ontario’s Children, published last week by U of T’s School of Public Policy and Governance as part of its pre-election Transition Briefings Series

The paper starts by noting the emerging body of evidence that asset-based policies – that is, providing financial assistance to youth from poorer families, years before they attend post-secondary, through various types of savings plans like the Canada Learning Bond – have quite large and positive effects on the likelihood of those students attending post-secondary education.   She also notes that low-income youth (and other underserved groups, notably Indigenous students) are often in need of more intensive career guidance and community-based academic aid (for example, though programs like Pathways to Education or Manitoba’s Career Trek) as well as financial aid.

Robson’s call is for the Government of Ontario to do more of both: she calculates that the Government of Ontario could, for $10.2 million, provide $700 for every child born into the bottom income decile.  This, combined with the Canada Learning Bond (and compound interest), would give every recipient $4,000 in funds for post-secondary by age 18 before any other student aid is calculated.  She also suggests another $2 million to fund four Career Trek-like programs across the province (I think she’s insufficiently ambitious here, but no matter).

But here’s the kicker – this can be paid for entirely through a small and eminently feasible tweak to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP).  All the province would need to do is to stop handing out grants to students from families making more than $160,000 per year. That simple move would generate almost exactly the amount of money required for the savings grants and career programming.

You may be asking yourself – why on God’s green earth is the government of Ontario handing out grants to families making over $160,000, or about 1.7 times the province’s median family income?  The answer goes back to the 2011 provincial election, when the Liberals – and everyone else – were dead certain they were going to be voted out of office.  A ridiculous 30% tuition rebate grant to all families with income under $160,000 (a level which has since increased with indexation) was dreamed up, in the words of someone who worked on that miraculous campaign, “in the hopes of keeping some of our electoral coalition together – it never occurred to us we’d have to implement it”.  Premier Wynne had a chance to undo this ludicrous policy two years ago when the government came up with its free tuition for low/middle-income families policy, but decided against it and continued to fund grants to wealthy families.

Now, despite how excellent and sensible and self-funding Robson’s proposals are, there are a number of reasons why I am skeptical they will get much traction.  Student groups won’t make it a priority because unlike tuition fees or grants, this proposal doesn’t actually give their current members anything.  The Liberals will be reluctant to do it because it implicitly suggests their current policy is badly targeted (which it is).  As for the opposition parties – who knows?  They might take up the idea because it’s not clear they have any better ideas; on the other hand, it’s not a natural fit for either party (New Democrats tend to fixate on tuition as a policy response and Tories – well, it’s hard to say what Tories believe in on PSE anymore, but it seems unlikely to be a high-priority field under a Ford government)

In an ideal world, a choice between spending access dollars on youth from the bottom income decile and spending on families making over $160,000 should be a no-brainer.  The fact that there is any doubt at all that parties might not take up these ideas says a whole lot more about the impoverished state of post-secondary access discourse In Ontario than it does about the quality of these proposals.  Ontario policymakers need to take note.