Ontario Student Loan Repayment Assistance Participation Rates

Ontario data tracks the number of OSAP loan recipients who enrolled in the Repayment Assistance Plan across eight academic years from 2010-11 to 2017-18. The dataset includes counts of loan recipients and plan participants, broken down by postsecondary sector, institution, and program. It was published by the Government of Ontario and was last updated in March 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze the correlation between `postsecondary sector` and `repayment assistance participation rate` to compare financial distress across university, college, and private career college graduates.
• Model the `repayment assistance participation rate` for specific `institution name` and `program name` combinations to identify high-risk academic pathways.
• Track trends in `number of Repayment Assistance Plan participants` from July 2013 to July 2020 to assess the impact of economic cycles on recent graduate debt.
• Compare the `number of OSAP loan recipients` from a given year to the corresponding plan participants count to calculate institution-level uptake rates of the assistance program.

Strengths

• Data spans eight consecutive academic years from 2010-11 to 2017-18, allowing for longitudinal analysis.
• Provides breakdowns at four levels of granularity: province, sector, institution, and program.
• Includes a calculated `repayment assistance participation rate` field for direct year-over-year comparison.

Limitations

• Data is temporally stale, covering loan cohorts up to 2017-18 with assistance snapshots ending in July 2020.
• Row counts and total sample size are unknown, making it difficult to assess statistical significance.
• Program-level data (`program name`) is only available starting from the 2014 rates, limiting earlier cohort analysis.

Provenance

Source

Government of Ontario

Collection Method

Administrative data from the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP).

Time Range

2010-11 to 2017-18 academic years, with assistance plan snapshots from July 2013 to July 2020.

Freshness

The dataset metadata was last updated in March 2026, but the underlying data coverage ends in July 2020.

Geography

Ontario, Canada.