As Aidan Jeffers begins his graduate studies at the University of Toronto, he says he will have to work more hours and possibly rely on food banks due to drastic changes to student financial aid in Ontario – and the resulting debt he expects to rack up.
Jeffers said he’s been working two jobs over the summer as large student loans weigh on his mind. He also plans to work 25 or 30 hours a week during the school year.
“I might have to go to the food bank a couple of times,” said Jeffers, an incoming master’s student in library and information science. “I’ll be working during my master’s instead of completely locking in.”
Earlier this year, Premier Doug Ford’s government announced it would sharply cut student assistance grants, citing “unsustainable” costs. As of Aug. 1, the proportion of non-repayable grants a student can receive through the Ontario Student Assistance Program has been reduced from 85 per cent to a maximum of 25 per cent, with the rest given in loans.
The province also lifted a seven-year tuition fee freeze, allowing colleges and universities to raise tuition by up to two per cent per year for the next three years.
Post-secondary students across the province are now bracing for the impact of those changes as a new school year approaches. Many have said that significantly scaled-back OSAP grants will saddle them with high debt loads amid economic uncertainty.
Jeffers said he relied on OSAP throughout his undergraduate studies and will continue to do so in graduate school.
“The biggest change is the amount of actual loans I’ll be getting, as opposed to the grants,” Jeffers said. “My tuition costs have also gone up.”
With 85 per cent of his OSAP funding now being loans, Jeffers said he’s “incurring a vast amount more debt” than he did in his undergraduate years. He said he’ll be receiving around $19,500 this year, of which $12,000 will go toward tuition.
The OSAP changes were announced after Jeffers had already decided to pursue his master’s, but he still had enough time to calculate his costs and come up with a plan before starting school.
“I’m even still one of the lucky ones, because I can adjust and say, ‘OK, this is what I thought the expenditure was going to be, but now I know it’s going to be this much, and this is how much debt I’m going to incur,’” he said.
“It’s still very stressful. But for people who are in the middle of their master’s or their undergrad, it’s definitely a big change.”
Jeffers said some of his peers have decided not to pursue graduate studies due to the amount of debt they would have to take on.
Rory Norris, president of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance and a recent University of Waterloo graduate, said it’s hard to measure how the changes will affect students this year, since many are only now discovering what their OSAP funding will look like.
Norris said many students rely on the online OSAP calculator to plan their finances in advance, but it was only recently updated to reflect the funding changes.
He said surveys conducted by the student alliance over the years have shown how much Ontario students’ education depends on OSAP.
“When it comes to what students rely on to support themselves in post-secondary, (OSAP) is the highest ranked out of anything, even ahead of part-time jobs and family,” he said. “Even before the changes took place, over 80 per cent of students said OSAP was their highest form of financial aid.”
Ishan Bijukuchhay, a computer engineering student at Queen’s University, said his OSAP funding was 60 per cent grants and 40 per cent loans in his first year of study.
“Now it’s more like 85 per cent loans and 15 per cent grants,” he said. “I wasn’t anticipating this much of a switch.”
Bijukuchhay said his overall OSAP funding has also dropped by about $3,000.
He has worked as a lifeguard to help cover his expenses, and he recently learned that he automatically qualified for Queen’s work-study program, which will help offset the OSAP grant cuts. He has also received bursaries from the university but said a tuition fee increase means he will continue to be reliant on both OSAP and the school’s financial services.
Beyond tuition, “there’s rent, there’s fees, there’s supplies,” Bijukuchhay said.
“I will continue to seek out assistance to afford fees for the traditional university experience for events in upcoming years, such as my engineering discipline banquet and the science formal, among other events,” he said.
The Ontario government says OSAP grant cuts were necessary.
“For this fiscal year 2025-26, OSAP costs ballooned even further to $2.7 billion. If our government did not make these changes, OSAP would have cost $4.1 billion by 2028-29,” Bianca Giacoboni, a spokesperson for Colleges and Universities Minister Nolan Quinn, wrote in a statement.
Data previously obtained by The Canadian Press through a freedom-of-information request shows that between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years, the province spent $465 million more on OSAP grants, and 95 per cent of that went to private career college students. Opposition critics have said that shows the government did not have to penalize students at universities and publicly funded colleges with across-the-board grant cuts.
Giacoboni said the government will continue to support qualified low-income students through the Ontario Learn and Stay Grant and Student Access Guarantee programs.
The tuition fee increases will result in an “additional cost of $0.18 per day for college students and $0.47 a day for university students” on average, her statement said.
Norris, the head of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, said the group representing about 160,000 students across the province believes changes are needed to the OSAP loan repayment model itself. Removing interest on provincial student loans is even more important now that their amounts will be higher, he said.
In 2023, the federal government eliminated interest on the federal portion of student loans. Ontario and Saskatchewan remain the only two provinces where interest accrues on the provincial portions of student loans.
Norris also said the OSAP repayment grace period should be extended past the current six months. That would give students more flexibility, he said, pointing to data that suggests it’s taking university graduates longer to find work.
A November 2025 report by the student alliance group found that unemployment rates for Ontario youth with a bachelor’s degree was nearly 12 per cent, versus the national rate of nine per cent.
Statistics Canada data shows that 25 per cent of college students and 50 per cent of university undergraduate students in Ontario had more than $25,000 in debt at graduation in 2020, comparable to national figures from that year.
Accumulating even more debt through OSAP may not be an option for many, advocates say.
“You’re delaying all these other life milestones, like buying a house, starting a family, just because you’re putting so much of this money that you’d traditionally be able to do those sorts of things with into these repayments that you’re having to make,” Norris said.
Bijukuchhay, the Queen’s University student, said he was 17 years old at the time of the last provincial election and he is now more interested in politics after seeing how government policy affects students. His peers are also more aware of those issues, he said.
“They definitely have to feel more aware of their finances, and be more aware of the government and its policies, and how those policies affect them day to day — and in the future, too,” he said.
