The Disaster Unfolding at Colleges & Universities

3 November 2020

To the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities for Ontario, Minister Ross Romano

And

To the Critic of Training, Colleges and Universities for Ontario, Chris Glover

And

To Member of Provincial Parliament Jennie Stevens, representative of St. Catharines

Sirs and Madame,

Today it is with the heavy heart of a mother and the promptings of conscience that I write to implore you to address the crisis that has been unfolding at our colleges and universities across Ontario. As you know, young adults enrolled at post-secondary institutions in our province are involved in the largest experiment in educational continuity ever embarked upon. Rapidly adopted remote and hybrid learning have been put in place in response to the current pandemic. We are weathering COVID-19 in our shared and imperfect humanity, but students are bearing an unfair share of the burden. These experiments are massive extensions of on-going reforms to e-learning that have supplemented university and college courses for the past 16 years. Many of them have long shown mixed-results and some are unsuccessful in terms of completion rates. Methods in remote learning are also untested risks that remove all of the earlier evolutions in higher education that we have been developing since the time of Confucius and Socrates.

Our post-secondary students, some who are not even 18, are bearing the entire risk of this experiment. No one appears to be considering all the financial, emotional, intellectual and mental ways it is impacting their present and their future. When I started at the University of Toronto in 1990, my tuition was just under $2000 per year. While I was raised by a single mother, I had access to orphan’s benefits in the amount of $150 per month. Working during the summer months and for about 10 hours per week during the school year enabled me, with OSAP loans, to complete my BA and MFA.

In contrast, when my son started at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Sciences and Engineering this September, exactly 30 years later, his tuition was almost $16,000 and it came without access to the facilities on campus, student services or any of the other social and academic supports that help to transition young adults into their independent lives. An added pressure is the OSAP reform that punishes students who drop out or change their programs. In those cases, financial grants are converted to loans, giving students from the least financially privileged back grounds who are unable to cope in their current academic circumstances an additional burden. If a student in receipt of Orphan’s or Survivor’s benefit -- like I was -- were to drop out, they would lose that minimal support in a time when wages are dropping and putting even modest rental accommodation out of reach. In other words, failure of a course can result in situations that are unbearable. As students do not have access to the normal supports, and no informed guidance about how to reach those supports in their unrecognizable online form, we are now watching a disaster unfold.

I urge you not to dismiss these disasters as individual failings. This morning, I learned that a young engineering student in residence at the University of Toronto chose to end their own life. I did not know this young person, but my heart is broken for their family, for their friends, for their community and, most of all, for their parents. Making this event worse for all of us in Ontario is the knowledge that this is not an isolated incident and, as mid-term exams progress, all of our post-secondary students are in grave peril.

Clearly, we need to take the complete burden of risk off our college and university students. As a society, we need to address sharing risk, tracking the learnings of this experiment as it progresses and provide places of respite and relief should this experiment, ultimately, fail even one more student.

I urge you all to immediately embark on cross-party, non-partisan efforts to address this issue for our post-secondary students and for Ontario’s future as a whole.

With deep concern,

Kate Baggott