All Posts Tagged With: "OSAP"

Election promise: six more months of interest free loans

Photo courtesy of JenniferK on Flickr

Ontario Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty said he would give Ontario college and university graduates an extra six months of interest-free status for their student loans if they take a job in the non-profit sector upon graduation. That would be on top of the six month interest-free period that all students currently receive. ”We believe it’s important for young people to have an opportunity to help our broader society,” McGuinty told young Liberals in Sudbury on Saturday. Ontarians will vote on Oct. 6.

Using ID to get a piece of paper to get more ID, to get a loan

A couple days ago I made an appointment to get my student loan for this semester. I needed a piece of photo ID, but apparently my health card expired three weeks ago so I couldn’t use it as proof that I’m, well, me.

And I wasn’t allowed to use my student card, supposedly because it would be easier to forge than government-issued photo ID.

So instead I used my student card to renew my health card, and then used the piece of paper they issued me at the OHIP which proves I’ve applied for a new card, to get my student loan for this semester.

Seriously.

Looking back at the “OSAP diet” campaign

Some time ago I wrote a couple of pieces about OUSA‘s campaign revolving around the so-called OSAP Diet. The idea was to draw attention to the fact that post-secondary students, living on OSAP, are budgeted at $225/month for food, or $7.50 a day. I’ll draw your attention to the older stories if you want to catch up, but suffice it to say that a lot of the debate revolves around whether or not students should reasonably be expected to cook their own meals and pack lunches for themselves, and whether or not a daily Starbucks “coffee” (read $5 frappasomething) constitutes a necessary food expense.

Related: The OSAP diet and the student lifestyle
Related: Budgeting for the real world

Now I’m all for giving students a livable budget for their studies, and we can debate back and forth just what that budget should be, but I was underwhelmed then and I remain incredibly skeptical now about the verbiage thrown around in context of this campaign. Students continually referred to this as “poverty” (for which no official definition exists in Canada, by the way) and suggested it was simply impossible to eat healthily on this budget. I won’t put further words in the mouths of the OUSA campaigners, however, and if you’d like to view the results of their experiment you can do so here.

My major issue, all along, is that comparisons to poverty and even starvation are rather apoplectic when welfare recipients in Ontario (excuse me, “public assistance”) receive so much less. If students imagine that they are starving on $225 a month, you’d expect those on welfare to be literally dropping dead. And in fact the reality isn’t far short of that. If OSAP represents a diet then welfare is a real famine. It isn’t so much that I resent students for their campaign for more funds as I’m rather embarrassed when it ignores such a terrible and inevitable contrast. It suggests, much as I hate to admit it, that students are fine with our most vulnerable starving just as long as they can avoid packing their meals for school.

Anyway, I was reminded of this again when the Star (which is rapidly becoming Canada’s best investigative newspaper) ran a similar experiment. In context of The Stop’s “Do The Math” Campaign the Star asked some prominent Torontoians to try living on a true welfare diet. The results were very much like what OUSA wishes it could demonstrate about the OSAP situation. We’re talking about true, desperate poverty now–visits to the food bank, reliance on public agencies, excitement at receiving a doggie bag to take home following a free lunch. The article made me cringe. Now we’re not talking about students who simply fail at cooking their own meals. We’re talking about very competent adults using every tool they have, and still struggling.

Most affecting in this story was an observation from Catherine Mihevc, Councillor Joe Mihevc‘s 11 year-old daughter, and which pretty much secured my lifetime support of his political career. Their entire family participated in the challenge, and she said that she and her sister were rarely hungry because their parents let them eat first. For me that’s a part of my immediate family history. My grandparents were refugees and their children always ate first too, when things were bad. As the children got older they knew to leave enough for their mother, because otherwise she simply wouldn’t eat. And this is what true poverty looks like. These are the strategies that it teaches.

I hate to ever set one group’s claims in direct competition with another’s. There is no reason why adequate funding for post-secondary studies needs to come at the expense of livable public assistance, or vice versa. But I do wish OUSA could have adopted a wider view on this issue, because the OSAP Diet campaign unavoidably trivializes the real problems that some people experience in simply feeding themselves and their children. It locates the needs of those who rely on public assistance outside of any operative definition of human norms. And really, that is exactly the problem with the system as is stands. No one is even trying to be realistic. Welfare is viewed as a punishment, not as an adequate amount of money to subsist on. And that has got to change.

Anyway, it’s something to think about the next time you stop at Starbucks. Or perhaps even before you do.

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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter.

The OSAP Diet experiment yields results already

My last piece was a response to the “OSAP Diet” experiment, as undertaken by the OUSA. On first pass I was underwhelmed by the idea. Living on $7.50/day for food doesn’t seem too radical to me. But unexpectedly I find the project has become very interesting. It’s demonstrating that students are shockingly ignorant about budgeting, food costs, and the world as it appears to anyone paying their own bills.

The Varsity ran a piece in their current issue, taking students’ reactions to the campaign. I’d love to link directly to the article in the paper but I think this content doesn’t make it to their website. If anyone can find it, somewhere, please let me know. In the meanwhile, I’ll simply say that six students at random were stopped on campus and questioned on the topic, including their own budgets and spending habits. The article comes with first names and photos, but I’ll omit them for now. Let’s just say I’m protecting the ludicrous. Their comments are as follows:

• “I think it’s hard for students living on $7.50 a day to actually get things done. It adds to the stress of trying to live day to day. I’d spend about $20 a day, or try to anyway.”
• “I don’t think it’s enough at all. If I were living alone, I think I’d spend over $20 a day on food. I mean, just one coffee is $5, and that’s almost the entire OSAP allowance.”
• “I’d say I spend about $15 a day, not including alcohol, but that changes during exam time due to time constraints. I certainly couldn’t live on $7.50 a day.”
• “A meal itself is $5-10, so I’d say I spend $30-40 a day. If they can do it, good for them–if they’re not thin and gaunt by the end, that is.”
• “I’d say I spend at least $15, and I cook a lot, so that’s not even eating out. Good food costs more than junk food, too.”
• “That’s definitely way too low for food. It’s possible, but a bit of a stretch. I probably spend about $15 a day.”

This is a sample group of six. Probably not enough to draw elaborate conclusions from. But I’ll make some preliminary observations and then I’ll suggest that I’d love to learn more and in fact I think this experiment could have wide implications for our approach to education.

First, we’ve got the $5 coffee again. Someone needs to find whoever it is at Starbucks who managed to redefine their elaborate concoctions as reasonable daily beverage purchases and give that person an award. But leaving aside the one rhetorical point, many students seem to classify daily retail food purchases as part of a standard, baseline budget. Some simply assume that every meal must cost whatever a restaurant is charging. The difference between eating on a budget and splurging on a meal is, apparently, the distinction between MacDonald’s and sushi. And that’s just insane.

Second, most students fail at cooking and have no sense at all of how to shop. For the ones who live at home with parents this may be considered normal, perhaps. But even so, you might expect they’d know the difference between grocery shopping on a budget and not. I hate to sound like an old guy here, grumbling stupidly about “kids today,” but when I was a kid my mother took me grocery shopping. And she showed me how to find cheaper stuff and things on sale. Hell, we even bought dented cans sometimes. I’m not saying every student needs to go that far and in fact we often didn’t. But at least I learned the difference.