Our mission: To promote a high-quality and affordable system of post-secondary education in Ontario. 

Ontarians take pride in their educational systems and it's no wonder since this province has led the world in providing accessible, affordable, high-quality post-secondary education. This has been made possible by the significant financial investment that only public funding can provide.

In 2007-08, Ontario spent the equivalent of 0.9 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product on higher education, down from 1.1 per cent in the late 1980s. By restoring the government's spending by less than one per cent, the decline in quality of higher education can be reversed.

More than ever before, Ontario needs a highly-educated workforce in order to be competitive in the knowledge-based economy and provide opportunities for social mobility.

We seek to halt the erosion of quality and affordability in Ontario's system of public higher education. We believe that students need a post-secondary education that is both affordableand engaging. Neither goal has to be sacrificed, provided that government reverses its bias towards privatization and restores public funding.

Our principle: High-quality education should be affordable, engaging, and publicly funded.

1. Post-secondary education should be affordable and accessible

Average tuition fee increases in Ontario have occurred at a rate that is four times faster than inflation since 1990. This has led to financial hardship for families, burdening many students with huge debt, and preventing many lower-income people from enrolling at all. During this time, the quality of education has been affected as well and many students have been forced to take time away from their studies to spend long hours at paid work during the school year to make ends meet. Education must be considered a public good, and government investments must protect students from tuition fee increases and mounting personal debt.

2. Post-secondary education should be engaging and of high-quality

Engaged students respond to challenging assignments and participate in university and college life. They are enthusiastic, curious, optimistic, and interested in their studies. Unfortunately, Ontario students report engagement levels almost 30 per cent below their American peers, whose public universities are well-funded by comparison and who can afford more institutional support for student success. Ontario's student-faculty ratio has risen to 27 to 1, almost twice the American ratio of 15 to 1. With Ontario students experiencing so much less interaction with faculty, it is little wonder that they are so much less engaged. 

3. Post-secondary education that is of high quality must include staffing levels that ensure manageable workloads:

Enrolment in Ontario's post secondary institutions has been aggressively expanded, and this expansion has not been met by a commensurate increase in the number of academic and staff support positions. Institutions are not only bricks and mortar, but places in which students, faculty and support staff interact. This human element is a critical aspect of the learning experience.  Academic and support staff are increasingly stretched to their limits too, in delivering programs and services to students. Staffing levels along with manageable workloads must be a key funding consideration if our institutions are to properly deliver highly educated and capable graduates.  Working conditions should be negotiated through free collective bargaining, which also recognizes the Charter-protected right of staff to organize.

4. Post-secondary education should be publicly funded

Tuition and ancillary fees now cover 43 per cent of Ontario universities' operating costs, up from 15 per cent in the 1980s. This privatization by stealth endangers quality, as tuition fees have increasingly financed education while successive governments have retreated from their funding responsibilities. The result has been an erosion of funding that threatens the academic and research missions of Ontario's post-secondary institutions. In absence of adequate public funding, alternative private funding has been relied upon to fund core and capital operations. This has taken a variety of forms, including through corporate donations to capital infrastructure and to research, and through increasing user fees. Only public funding can provide the degree of investment needed to provide a robust, engaging education to all qualified students, regardless of their income.