The Ontario Government is about to revise the Ontario Tuition Fee Framework & Ancillary Fee Guidelines. The UTSU believes that post-secondary education should be accessible to all willing and qualified students.
President Muntaka Ahmed and Vice-President, Public & University Affairs Tyler Riches recently submitted a letter advocating on behalf of 38,000 full time U of T undergraduate students who make up the UTSU membership.
This revision comes during the COVID-19 pandemic, an incredibly challenging time for everyone, but especially for those whose finances are impacted by the economic impacts of the pandemic, including many students.
The University of Toronto Students’ Union offered the following recommendations to the Ontario Government:
- Continue to freeze tuition across all programs while increasing operating grants until students are contributing approximately one-third of universities’ total operating budgets.
- Eliminate deferral fees and late fees for tuition incurred during the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 academic years.
- Reduce tuition fees for previously deregulated professional undergraduate programs, such as computer science, bioinformatics, and data science, so that they are equal to tuition fees for other undergraduate arts & science programs, while proportionately increasing operating grants to offset the cost of this reduction.
- Mandate that universities provide an alternative method of grading, or additional financial aid, where students are required to purchase digital learning materials for assessments that make up a portion of a students’ grade.
This is the latest in a series of advocacy efforts undertaken by the UTSU with the provincial government. To read the full submission, you can download the PDF here.
