Amy Mather doesn’t know what she’ll do now that the province has ended her free tuition.“It’s terrifying, to be honest,” said the 21-year-old, who’s studying child and youth care. “I’ve been at Ryerson for two years now on free tuition and it’s still very difficult.”Mather is one of thousands of students hit last week by the provincial government’s announcement of a sweeping package of reforms to the Ontario Student Assistance Program and tuition. It includes a 10 per cent cut to tuition fees across the board, but it also means the end of both free tuition for lower-income students and of the six-month grace period on interest being charged on loans after finishing a degree. Those are changes that many students say will make paying for their education much more difficult or impossible.Mather says it might cost her the chance to finish her degree. The whole reason she decided to go back to school, after a year off, was the free tuition program, introduced by the Liberal government in 2016. All her tuition was covered under the grant and she also qualified for an OSAP loan that covers living expenses, such as the $1,300 in rent she pays for a basement apartment with her partner in Ajax.She already works three jobs and doesn’t get help for school from her parents. Read more:The student, the parent, the graduate: the people hit by Tories’ OSAP shakeup weigh inFree-tuition program is gone, tuition reduced and student fees are no longer mandatory, Ford government announcesOpinion | Martin Regg Cohn: Ontario’s buck-a-beer playbook is coming to a campus near you — with tuition discounts too good to be trueMather has an idea of what it will be like without the free tuition because she started her post-secondary education at Carleton University in 2015, before it kicked in. She incurred $18,000 in debt from that first year alone.“And then I took a year off because I couldn̵ ...
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