Last week, the Ontario Auditor General put out a report on the Ontario Student Assistance Program and more specifically the new Ontario Student Grants – you know, the ones that made the province’s Targeted Free Tuition program possible.  And while the media release that accompanied the report really reads as if it had been written by a partisan staffer (it is void of nuance), the report itself is pretty interesting, not least because it accomplishes what apparently OSAP was incapable of doing on its own: namely, actually providing the public with any information about the program.

(Brief aside: Ontario is uniquely awful at providing information on student aid.  And that’s up against some pretty stiff competition since apparently only Quebec and Saskatchewan are able to pass the simple test of telling citizens every year how much student aid is loan and how much is grant.  Alone among the ten provinces, Ontario does not separately report the costs of student aid from other post-secondary costs in its estimates, and it’s also the only province that doesn’t provide estimates on the same day as the provincial budget, preferring to wait a few weeks until no one is looking.  So Ontario is in the weird position of claiming to have the greatest and most progressive student aid system in the country, while apparently taking the view that publicly releasing any data about the program like take-up or expenditures is equivalent to breaking the Official Secrets Act.  This province, man.)

Anyways, here’s a few of the tidbits that came out of the review.  First, and maybe most importantly, take up was waaaaay higher than expected.  The Government seems to have budgeted for near-zero new take-up and assumed grant outlays would only rise by about $250 million (which would have been more than covered by the elimination of tax credits).  As it turned out, expenditures actually rose $600 million.  More than 100% of that increase came from what the report calls “mature” students (but which should be called “independent” students – meaning those more than four years out of secondary school).

The dependent/independent line (which I have discussed before in some detail back here) – that is to say, the line where students’ parents’ income are no longer taken into account – is one of the trickiest decisions in student aid policy.  Obviously, there are some independent students – mainly students returning to education after a spell in the labour market – who probably do need grant aid to access post-secondary.  On the other hand, there are a substantial number of students who are technically independent who would be just as likely to go with loans as with grants.  Some still live with their parents; others may live apart but have parents with very high incomes – but under current policy, they are all treated as if they were essentially penniless and in need of grants.

I don’t think there is much doubt, based on the data in this report, that a lot of grant money is now going to people who don’t actually have an access challenge and one suspects that a lot of these people are in the “independent” student category.  If there are going to be cuts to the program – and I would say this is a certainty given the signals coming from this government – and we want to maintain the principle of free tuition for low/middle-income entering students (ie. the ones for whom we have legitimate concerns about access, not ones who have already been in post-secondary for a few years) then the obvious trade is to reduce the program’s generosity to older students.  The simplest (but not necessarily the best) way to do this is to lengthen the dependence period  – make it five years out of high school instead of four.  On its own, this would almost certainly cut $100 million from the program; reducing eligibility for students from families making over $100,000 would save another $100 million.  These cuts will hurt – but it will be worth it to save the program for those for whom we know the program makes the most sense.

On that latter point – knowing the program effectiveness – the Auditor General rightly goes up one side of the provincial government and down the other for the frankly unconscionable way in which it chose to completely walk away from any responsibility it had to actually measure program effectiveness (unconscionable but not exactly surprising – the Wynne government frequently behaved as if spending money was an end in itself).  Simply put, OSAP has almost no idea whether the program was effective or not (though it could still come up with some reasonable data both on access and retention if it just followed some of my suggestions from back here).  The problem, unfortunately, is that in the absence of OSAP actually having its own program logic model or data to back it up, the Auditor General has started to come up with her own crude measures of success, like total enrolments.

The fact is, experience elsewhere has shown that providing low-income students money and – more importantly – guarantees of funding, like a free tuition promise, can have a major impact on access.  In fact, just yesterday, the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) published the results of a high-quality experiment in Michigan that suggested that this kind of program can halve the rich-poor disparity in access to flagship universities among students eligible to attend.

It is, obviously, a shame that Canadian governments are so allergic to evaluation that we can’t come up with similar quality data on our own programs, but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that targeted grants programs can be very effective.  The Ontario Auditor General is right to shame the government on how it has handled the program so far, but that doesn’t mean the program itself is a bad one.  Some, if not all, elements of it are very much worth saving.  One hopes a fiscally conservative government is not so blinded by the opportunity to save money that it misses something of real value.