Private Sector Surge, Public Sector Pain: FOI Data Reveals Root of Ontario’s OSAP Crisis

Newly uncovered provincial data has thrown a wrench into the Ford government’s justification for its recent, deeply unpopular cuts to student financial assistance. While the province previously defended gutting the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) by claiming the mounting financial burden was completely “unsustainable,” internal records reveal that nearly the entire spending surge was driven by a single, specific sector: private career colleges.

According to documents obtained by The Canadian Press through a freedom-of-information request, Ontario’s spending on OSAP grants ballooned by $465 million between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years. However, an overwhelming 95% of that massive increase went directly to students enrolled in private career colleges, rather than the province’s publicly funded universities and community colleges.

The revelation has ignited fierce backlash from opposition critics, who argue the government manufactured a crisis within the private sector to justify sweeping penalties against public university and college students who had nothing to do with the spending spike.

The newly released data highlights a stark divergence in how provincial financial aid has been distributed over the last two academic years. While funding for public institutions flattened or dropped, private career colleges saw an unprecedented influx of provincial cash:  Public Universities Received roughly $370 million in Ontario Student Grants in 2023-24. The following year, that figure actually decreased to $354 million.  Public Colleges Received $349 million in 2023-24, seeing a modest bump to $386 million the next year. Private Career Colleges Experienced an explosive funding spike, jumping from $554 million in 2023-24 to a staggering $994 million the following year.

At nearly a billion dollars, the provincial grant allocation for private career college students managed to surpass the combined total funding given to every public university and college student in Ontario.

Interestingly, the federal government did not experience the same lopsided growth. While Canada Student Grants for career college students did tick upward moving from $201 million to $338 million over the same period the increase was far more regulated than the provincial counterpart. Data suggests the imbalance stems from career colleges often charging significantly higher tuition fees, leading to much higher average individual grant payouts under Ontario’s previous funding formulas.

Earlier this year, Colleges and Universities Minister Nolan Quinn announced a massive overhaul to the provincial student aid framework. Citing unmanageable costs, the government drastically restructured OSAP, dropping the maximum non-repayable grant allocation from a generous 85% down to a rigid 25%. Under the new rules, the remaining 75% of a student’s calculated financial need must be taken on as a repayable loan, forcing future graduates into significantly deeper debt.

While the overhaul completely stripped private career college students of future OSAP grant eligibility entirely to plug the leak, the sweeping 25% grant cap was still applied across the board to public institutions.

Opposition parties wasted no time using the newly uncovered data to label the government’s rhetoric an excuse for an ideological shift toward privatization and austerity.

“Doug Ford used the rising cost of OSAP as his excuse to gut student aid, slashing the grant portion from 85 per cent down to 25 per cent and leaving students to take on more debt,” Liberal colleges and universities critic Tyler Watt said in a public statement. “These numbers show that excuse doesn’t hold up.”

NDP Leader Marit Stiles echoed those sentiments, suggesting the government applied broad strokes to avoid looking like it was targeting its own allies in the private post-secondary market.

“I think they were unwilling to only make cuts that impacted their friends at the private career colleges,” Stiles remarked. “It just shows me that they never actually explored options that would have saved the program, and it’s students that are going to pay the price.”

While the government continues to point toward a past Auditor General’s report warning that structural changes made to OSAP back in 2017 created an unsustainable financial trajectory, critics argue the underlying problem was a lack of oversight on exploding private enrollments not the baseline needs of students attending Ontario’s public institutions. With tuition freezes lifting and grant options dwindling, domestic students across the province are left facing a dramatically more expensive path to higher education.