Doug Ford’s changes to university funding is good news for universities and terrible news for poor students
Posted on February 18, 2026 in Education Policy Context
Source: TheStar.com — Authors: Alex Usher
TheStar.com – Opinion/Contributors
Feb. 18, 2026. By Alex Usher, Contributor
Last week, the Ford Government announced that it was putting $6.4 billion over the next four years into the province’s beleaguered post-secondary sector. This was unabashedly good news, even if a little over a billion of that money was already being spent. $5.3 billion is a lot of money by any standards.
The finances of Ontario post-secondary institutions have been hit by a public funding freeze that dates from the Wynne era, a tuition freeze/reduction policy dating from 2019 and, for the last two years, a massive drop in revenue from international students following changes to the federal student visa regime.
The new revenue doesn’t make up for those cuts: by 2029-30 when the new money is phased in, the province’s post-secondary institutions will still be about $2.5 billion worse off (in 2025 dollars) than they were before the federal government introduced its new student visa policies. And Ontario will still be tenth out of ten provinces for per-student funding. But Thursday’s announcement will bring public funding back roughly to its previous all-time high of about $8.5 billion per year.
This is all good. Very good, in fact. But there’s a catch.
Some of the $5.3 billion is genuinely new. But over 50 per cent of the new money going to universities and colleges is being reallocated from within the Ministry — specifically, by taking about $700 million/year away from the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP).
For some time now, Ontario has had the most generous student assistance programs in the country outside of Quebec. Even the very large cuts that the Ford Government made to OSAP in 2019 didn’t alter this fact. In 2023-24, roughly 87 per cent of the $1.35 billion given out in Ontario student assistance was distributed in the form of a grant. But the Thursday announcement said the government wanted to bring that proportion down to just 25 per cent and use the savings to fund the new money to institutions.
The implications of that shift are pretty big. A student receiving the maximum $175/week from the provincial portion of OSAP (there is also a federal portion) will receive about $3500 less in grants than they did last year, and $3500 more in loans. Add to that the anticipated changes to the federal system which will shift about $1200 from grants to loans, and we are looking at a situation where the poorest students, the ones on maximum aid, will be paying a staggering $4700 more than they did last year.
Now, the government will almost certainly point to other provinces and say “we’re just doing what they’re doing!” And that would be correct: in Alberta and British Columbia, the grant-loan ratios are even lower than the 25:75 that Ontario is targeting. But that’s unlikely to be a comfort to the system’s most vulnerable students who are about to experience by far the largest single-year jump in net tuition ever seen in Canada.
There was, of course, another option. The government could simply have raised tuition back to about where it was in 2018. An increase in tuition fees of about $1250/year would have raised about as much income as the planned assault on student assistance and still seen fees about $1000/year lower, in real terms, than where they were when Ford came into office. More to the point, the extra costs of the policy would have been borne by richer students who don’t need student aid rather than those who do.
Instead, the Ford government chose to announce a rise in tuition of just two per cent per year for the next few years, or just enough to keep it level with inflation. This allows the government space to crow about “affordability” but it also gives this whole package a grotesque two-tier impact. Students from wealthier families will see an increase in costs next year of $200 thanks to these announcements. Meanwhile, the impact on poorer students will be as high as $3500, or about 18 times as large (more if Ottawa goes through with its own planned cuts).
In sum, this package is good news for institutions, but it is being funded in the most regressive way imaginable. The Government had other, fairer options available. It should have taken them. It chose not to.
Alex Usher is President of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a consultancy based in Toronto.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/doug-fords-changes-to-university-funding-is-good-news-for-universities-and-terrible-news-for/article_b419eb25-432e-46a4-aeee-b3d9774121f8.html
Tags: budget, Education, ideology, jurisdiction, participation, poverty
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