Stop Stepping on the Marginalized

I’m going to be honest, I’m kind of angry right now.

I got a message to check the status of my OSAP application for the fall, opened it up and found this:

“Your OSAP application has been compared to your two most recent study periods and there is evidence that you may not be satisfactorily progressing through your program. For example, you may have made multiple program or institution switches, or taken multiple one-year programs or you may have multiple study periods for the same year of your program.

Before any OSAP funding can be released, a review of your academic progress is required. In order to initiate that review, you must provide the following documentation:

• A letter explaining your academic goals, the circumstances (if any) that have affected your academic progression through your program and the steps you are taking to achieve your goals.
• A copy of transcripts showing your grades from your most recent study period. You do not have to purchase official transcripts.
• Documentation that supports the circumstances and steps you’ve described in your letter, if applicable (for example, medical documentation, or a letter from your academic counsellor).

Contact your financial aid office to discuss the review process and your situation to ensure that you provide the documentation needed to support your situation. If you are attending a private career college in Ontario or a school outside Ontario, contact the Ministry.”

Overall it’s pretty ridiculous because I’m one of the lucky people that does well in our (extremely imperfect, but that’s another conversation) school system: I’ve taken a full course load every term, gotten straight A’s, and am perfectly on stream for my co-op program, that is supposed to take five years alternating between school and work.

At first, I was mad because it’s going to be annoying dealing with this, and clearly OSAP has just fudged up and the system doesn’t understand how co-op works. Ultimately, however, in the long run it will be fine.

But then I thought about it some more and this is what really angers me:

So what if I was taking 5-6 years to do a 4 year program?

University is hard. Every single university in Canada has a Mental Health Crisis, because our country is in a mental health crisis, and if I were dealing with mental health issues, I wouldn’t need this bullshit. Period.

Students with mental health issues and/or students who require other accommodations already have a big burden placed on them to get accommodations at all – they need to do things like navigate a bureaucratic, frustrating accessibility system (yes many accessibility offices at Universities are inaccessible for one or more reasons); take time to get doctors notes, which are sometimes expensive (and thus inaccessible), which also takes time away from studying and working on assignments; and disclose personal information to strangers. This is often an emotional, stressful, time-consuming process.

If I needed to take time off school because of mental and emotional health I should not have to be running around trying to justify my existence.

Or maybe I needed to take some time off school to take care of family, I should not have to explain these personal choices to the government.

Or maybe I took some time off school to work and save up. I should not be forced to explain the personal circumstances of my life to strangers.

Or maybe I just wanted to take some time off school to find myself and figure out what I really want. That should be fine too. Of course people will be switching schools, and programs, most of us were 17 or 18 when choosing our universities, we didn’t know what we wanted to do.

And all this pressure from society to finish university in 4 years is ridiculous, we see it when we learn about successful friends and feel bad about where we are in our lives, we get it from well intentioned relatives asking us what we plan on doing after we graduate, and now to also be getting these same pressures from the government, is absurd. I get that this is about wanting to get OSAP loans repaid quickly, but that is not, and should not be a government’s priority.

A government’s job is to serve the people, not to balance budgets.

With this system they’re wasting the time of people who are fine, and placing undue pressure in addition to time burdens on those who are for whatever reason taking more than 4 years to finish school. As I mentioned earlier, I’m lucky in that I’m in a good position to be dealing with this, but the people with the potential to be most affected are those who are already marginalized.  

And any system that steps on, forgets about or disregards folks who are marginalized is not good enough.

Everyone has a different path, sometimes the paths our lives take us on aren’t straight, but sometimes they need to be that way so we can learn what we need to.

It is not the government’s place to tell me what my education should look like. Not what I should do, where I should go, or how long I should take.

My education is for me, so I can grow and make a meaningful contribution with my life and sure sometimes we need help, support, and a push in the right direction. And sometimes you just need to trust us.

We are the experts of our own lives and pressuring us to move along the assembly line is not how you get informed, engaged, brilliant, forward-thinking, innovative citizens.

I don’t have to justify my life to you. Period.

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With all this said, I want to turn your attention to two things: First, I challenge you to be on the lookout for other policies and procedures that forget about the marginalized. I guarantee that there are more. 

Second: Civic Engagement. Regardless of who put in this OSAP issue, we should make it known that it’s silly. One of the most visible and easiest ways to engage civically is by voting, and it really matters. Governments Matter. The bills and laws governments pass aren’t just some random policy that goes up in the air that doesn’t impact anyone. It is real people facing these consequences. I’ll give a personal example, several times since the Doug Ford government got in last year, I have felt the negative effects of their reckless uninformed decisions, and I know plenty of other people who have had their lives derailed. So PLEASE:

Get. Engaged.

VOTE. In the upcoming federal election in the fall and every subsequent election. In the meantime, speak to your elected representative, go to a protest, tweet about it. Do whatever you’re good at; whatever your gift is, use it to make sure you’re heard. My gift is writing, and that is why you’re reading this right now.

The truth is, most people care, they are decent, kind, and have the best intentions. We need to make that known to politicians. Right now if you go to elected officials about issues like education, environmental wellbeing, healthcare, peace-building, and equality, many are going to say they’d love to help but they just don’t see enough support for it (based on personal correspondence and the experiences of a colleague. Please let me know if you want more information). So show them support.

Because it’s not just how many voices, it’s also about how loud, so let’s speak so loudly that they will never forget.