Ontario’s recent announcement of a tuition increase and major changes to grant and loan structures have prompted student protests at the provincial legislature.
The province has said the changes are required for sustainability.
But changes to financial aid will have significant implications for many students who rely on grants and loans. As The Toronto Star reports, the reforms have almost reversed the ratio of non-repayable grants and loans students can access.
Education is a pillar of “social reproduction,” meaning it’s a social service necessary for maintaining daily life now and for future generations. When governments alter access to education and the way they deliver it, they shape everyday lives today and beyond.
Since legal and regulatory changes shape how society is reproduced, it is possible to draw from these changes some ideas about the government’s social values. From this perspective, Ontario’s Doug Ford government is sending the message that education is about generating private wealth and social order.
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These changes risk entrenching inequalities and raise questions about students’ freedom and their futures.
For a precedent, it’s possible to look at the record of a past U.S. president, namely Ronald Reagan.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
Education as a private asset
Currently, students can access up to 85 per cent grants and 15 per cent loans from the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). But under the financial aid reforms, a maximum of one quarter of a student’s OSAP funding will be non-repayable grants and a minimum of 75 per cent will be loans.
These changes mean there’s an upside for banks. With less funding through grants, students will be funnelled into private sector financial arrangements. Canada’s banks stand ready with student lines of credit.
As household assets (including financial investments, like Registered Retirement Savings Plans) continued to increase in value in the third quarter of 2025, it may seem rational and even attractive to view education as an asset meant to generate private wealth.
When Ford unveiled these changes, the private asset approach to education was clear when he responded to reporters:
“I mentioned to the students, you have to invest in your future, into in-demand jobs.”
Yet this approach ignores record-setting levels of household debt. It also glosses over the fact that the wealth gap is increasing. In the third quarter last year, the top 20 per cent wealthiest households accounted for 65.5 per cent of net worth, and the bottom 40 per cent accounted for 3.1 per cent.
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Just as we have seen with a profit-driven, wealth-generating housing market and the housing crisis, a private asset approach to education risks dividing society further into haves and have-nots.
This is not lost on students, as reflected in a recent University Affairs article quoting Grade 12 student Radhika Cappelletti:
“Things won’t run if people don’t continue to be educated and they can’t even choose to be educated because they can’t afford it.”
When students are financially bound to banks and dependent on their families, they face lasting pressures beyond the campus.
Revisiting Reagan
Ontario’s changes reflect a trend across the provinces that has been ongoing since the 1990s. They also follow a similar pathway as the Reagan era in the United States, with greater emphasis on student loans instead of grants.
As social and political theorist Melinda Cooper argues in her book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, Reagan pursued student discipline and budget cuts for universities, relying on police for one and the introduction of tuition fees for the other.
As California governor between 1967-1975, Reagan sat on the University of California’s Board of Regents. Considered the “crown jewel of American public universities,” the university system benefitted from public funding during the post-Second World War era.
Bipartisan support for this was based on the belief that post-secondary education was a public good benefitting the whole state, not just graduates.
(AP Photo/Nick Ut)
Later, as president throughout the 1980s, Reagan’s appetite to curb public spending grew, leading him to expand the role of loans and limit the availability of grants.
Cooper’s research shows that, as inflation outpaced wage growth in the early 1980s, growing wealth meant growing the value of assets — for those who had them. For those without assets, acquiring them required taking on debt. As the financial burden of education spreads through the family unit, it reinforces student dependency on the family, which encourages deference toward more traditional forms of authority.
Cooper finds that Reagan’s legacy was to make “parental responsibility” and “private-debt-based inclusion” the bases of access to education.
In these ways, socially conservative values resonate in what might otherwise be read as pragmatic, even politically and morally neutral financial decisions.
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Narrowing educational paths
Ford’s plan to increase tuition sits in stark contrast beside his April 2023 announcement of free tuition for police trainees. This shows that the government’s approach to education reflects certain social values, which have consequences for the future.
Research suggests that viewing student debt primarily as an investment in their personal job prospects invites cuts to post-secondary degree offerings and opens the door to predatory for-profit institutions.
There is also a question of how students can even achieve a brighter future. As long as they remain dependent on existing power structures, it is difficult to expect anything other than an ever-widening wealth gap.
Another Ford initiative has been a push to allow students to opt out of fees that are the lifeblood of campus groups. The Student Choice Initiative failed several court challenges, but a version reappears in the fast-tracked Supporting Children and Students Act that passed in November 2025.
Critics say that this scaling back of student fees could have detrimental effects on equity-seeking groups and also potentially weaken student governance — something Ford has derided in the past.
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For all of Ford’s talk of choice and the future, then, changes in post-secondary funding limit the choices students have over their own lives. By deepening inequalities, Ford is casting a long shadow over the future of all Ontarians.
