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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. 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. 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. (en)
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