General Discussions

Good morning, OASFAAFriends -

Just in case you're trying to get a handle on how the recently announced provincial grant changes might impact your students, here's an excel file that can do some rough math for you. You'll paste in your YTD file in the second tab, labelled "Flat Fed", in the blue cells starting on column AD, and the file should pull out the loans and grants for you. Note that you'll have to extend the formula rows if you have more than 10,375 application rows.

I offer no warranty on the accuracy / correctness of the the calculations or of the assumptions I've made in the file - eg. I have assumed that all provincial grants, including things like the commuting grant, may be reduced for 26-27, though there's no particular indication that this is the case. I was just trying to get a high level idea of what the impcacts would look like on real assessments.

Here's what I found for OCAD U:

All other factors being equal, it looks as though our total provincial grant funding will drop from $5.6 million this year to a little over $1.7 million next year, impacting 1,470 of our 2,125 funded applications. The impacts aren't evenly distributed - the largest decline will be experienced by sole support parents, and students from low income families living away from home. About 200 of these will lose over $5,000 in grant funding each year (converted to an equivalent value loan), while the highest need sole support parents may lose up to $13,200 in grants.

This change will shift the overall OSAP grant/loan percentage from the current 49% grant /51% loan to approximately 35% grant /65% loan, presuming that federal grants remain unchanged from current levels.

But of course federal grants may well change, and things will not be equal. I'm starting to drill down on the impact of, for example, students who have opted out of loan funding, as they may face cash flow issues that might make it difficult to persist.

Regardless, things will look different at your institution - so I encourage you to disregard my findings, and figure out what things look like for your cohort. Or, if you're smart, maybe you just hang on until we have further details from the Ministry rather than guessing and being wrong later. ;)

Happy to discuss if anyone wants to get into the weeds on this.

Anik