Ontario Student Assistance Program

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The Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) (French: Régime d'aide financière aux étudiantes et étudiants de l'Ontario (RAFEO)) is a provincial financial aid program that offers grants and loans to help Ontario students pay for their post-secondary education. OSAP determines the amount of money that a student is eligible to receive by considering factors such as tuition, course load, and the financial resources of the student. More than 380,000 students – more than half of all full-time students – received student financial aid in 2014-15.

In 2016, the Ontario government announced changes to OSAP that aimed to make post-secondary education more affordable for lower income families.^[1] Starting in the 2017–18 school year, these changes increased the proportion of financial aid in the form of grants, and completely covered the cost of average tuition for families earning less than $50,000 per year.^[2][3]

In 2019, the Ontario government announced cuts to OSAP in conjunction with a 10 percent reduction in post-secondary tuition fees. These changes would, starting in the 2019–20 school year, reduce the family income threshold for grants from $175,000 to $140,000, require that the loan-to-grant ratio for funding given to students be at least 50 percent loan, and remove the six-month interest-free grace period for the Ontario portion of loans following graduation.^[4][5][6]