With Reading Week now behind us, the 2015-16 academic year will soon come to a close. For many, the ending of one school year inevitably leads to the question of how to pay for the next one. As tuition prices continue to soar, and with the City of Toronto no less expensive to live in, this question becomes more daunting every year.
But where certain voids in funding exist, there are resources available to fill them at Victoria College and the University of Toronto. Millions of dollars in bursary and scholarship money are available to students at Vic to help ameliorate this problem, but understanding how to receive funding is half the battle. Figuring out who has the money and how to get it is a daunting task, one that many students (myself included) have avoided at the expense of our future credit ratings.
The Strand sat down with Victoria College registrar Susan McDonald to better understand student funding within Vic as well as through the UTAPS program. As it turns out, scholarships and other supplementary funding are not as hard to get as you might think.
Supplementary funding falls into four main categories: admission-based scholarships, in-course scholarships, application-based scholarships, and bursaries. Understanding the ins and outs of each will help you to better judge what you qualify for, and where you can best allocate your time and effort.
According to McDonald, “The University of Toronto has a guarantee that anyone whose admittance average is 92% or higher gets an admission scholarship…Victoria cuts off higher than that, because there’s a large portion of students that enter the university now with averages higher than 90%, especially at Victoria and Trinity Colleges.” These admission-based scholarships are one of the two sources of automatic funding available to students, for which there is no application needed.
In-course scholarships are a further source of funding for Victoria College students for which there is no application required. As a Vic student, if you achieve an A average (a GPA of 3.5 or higher) in an academic year, you will receive $1,000.00 automatically in supplementary funding. “Last year, 793 Vic students achieved this,” says McDonald. This equates to over 30% of the student body at Vic. This funding is provided following completion of a group of five credits up to three times, meaning each Vic student has the opportunity to earn $3,000.00 in scholarships.
But if there is still a gap after potential admissions and in-course scholarships, OSAP, and parental funding, students can apply for bursaries through Vic, as well as through University of Toronto Advance Planning for Students (UTAPS). Bursaries are needs-based, and thus students must demonstrate financial need in order to receive them. During the 2013-2014 school year, $27.5 million in grants were provided to undergraduate students at UofT through the UTAPS program, of which $9.2 million went to students in the faculty of Arts & Science. However, due to the higher tuition fees of programs such as computer science and Rotman Commerce, a large part of this bursary funding tends to go to students in these programs. Over 8,600 students received funding from UTAPS in the 2013-14 school year.
The bursaries available at Vic are given through endowments, as opposed to the operating budget. These are funds that have been given to the College by individuals for specific purposes, such as the Garnet Aikins Archibald Bursary, awarded to students expressing financial need following their first year of studies. UTAPS bursaries, however, are a part of the university’s operating budget. These bursaries are made available through clawback funds, which are required by the Government of Ontario in exchange for the university’s ability to make tuition fee increases for direct-entry programs (Arts & Science, Engineering, etc.). In other words, for the university to make you pay more tuition, they also have to make more money available through bursaries to help you pay your tuition and other expenses. This is known as the Student Access Guarantee (SAG), for which the university was required to provide $17.9 million in supplemental funding. An additional $11.9 million in funding was provided by the university, on top of their required SAG expenditures in the 2013-14 school year, for direct-entry programs.
When it comes to application-based scholarships, the conditions upon which each are awarded can be found on the Victoria College website. One award that McDonald is especially proud of is the Dr. Lorus J. Milne and Dr. Margery J. Milne Award, a product of a large endowment fund, which is awarded to life sciences students participating in research projects who cannot afford to sacrifice income during the summer months. “It addresses two things,” she says. “It gives students a grant, which looks great on a resume, and it allows them to maybe not have to work and instead focus on their research.” The Northrop Frye Centre Undergraduate Research Award is another such award given to humanities students for the same purpose, although with a smaller endowment than the abovementioned Milne award. These are just a couple of the many application-based scholarships available specifically to Victoria College students.
While the last thing we as students want to do during or after a school year is write another paper or fill out another application, applying for bursaries and scholarships is a relatively simple way to gain those few extra dollars to get rid of some debt or prevent yourself from taking on more. Even if you’re not sure if you qualify for that scholarship or bursary, apply anyway. As Susan McDonald told me regarding bursary funding, “I prefer to interview someone rather than say no. Even if I’m going to say no, I’d rather educate them so that they don’t feel hurt by it, and so that they know how to apply properly in the future.”
For more information on scholarships and bursaries available to Vic students, visit:
http://www.vic.utoronto.ca/Assets/VicCollege+Digital+Assets/Victoria+College/VicCollege+Digital+Assets/Registrar/Awards+and+Benefactors+Booklet.pdf
