About OUSA
The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is a non-partisan lobby group that represents the interests of undergraduate students to the Ontario government. OUSA’s membership is comprised of 140,000 students at seven Ontario post-secondary institutions including McMaster University.
Every undergraduate student pays $2.68 towards OUSA via the MSU.
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A major aspect of OUSA’s lobbying is addressing concerns students have about post-secondary education (PSE) by providing the Ontario government with policy solutions to key issues. More information about OUSA can be found at
www.ousa.ca.
Currently OUSA is drafting a policy paper on access to PSE. This paper examines what groups have low participation rates in PSE in Ontario, and how to reduce the barriers that prevent these groups from accessing PSE.
A few of the groups described as underrepresented in Ontario’s PSE system are:
Low-income students: Anyone who belongs in the lower 25% quartile of a certain family size. We will not verify your income status, it is completely confidential and self identification.
Rural and northern students: Anyone attending Mac who lived outside an 80km circle from any University
-First Generation students: First person in their family to go to a University.
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Aboriginal & Indigenous students .
The purpose of these focus groups is to get feedback from students, who identify as members of one or more of these groups, on OUSA’s access strategy. By facilitating these focus groups, OUSA hopes to gain insight into how students’ personal experience reflects the research on access to PSE, as well as feedback on strategies for improving access to PSE.
How information from the focus group could be used
1. To informally provide guidance to the policy development of OUSA’s access strategy
2. To incorporate anonymous statements from focus groups into OUSA’s access strategy paper; based on your consent
3. For future requests from OUSA to participants in the focus group for input and perspectives on access.
Why should you donate an hour of your time? One of the most effective lobbying techniques is presentation of both quantitative and qualitative research, the former being statistics, theoretical research, graphs etc. However to accentuate that OUSA also needs a "face" behind the numbers; a personal story, something that makes the whole issue "Human". These focus groups are ideal to gain that insight.
We Also have an honorarium in the form of
Tim Hortons Gift Cards for your time.
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If you belong to one of those categories: You can sign up for a focus group and help the MSU & OUSA in their efforts to make education more accessible for future and current generation of Ontario and McMaster Students.
The focus groups will be scheduled in the last week of October and will be facilitated by myself, the EA Committee and OUSA Home Office Staff. They should not be more then an
Hour
The tentative dates and times are:
Low Income:
Tuesday 26th between 1-4
Thursday 28th between 11-12, 2-4PM
First Generation:
Thursday 28th: 6PM
Send me a email at
[email protected] ter.ca to sign up or for any questions
Also, Visit the facebook event:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=1668255 73330426
Sincerely,
Huzaifa Saeed
MSU External Affairs Commissioner ’10/11
SRA Social Sciences ’10/11
McMaster Students Union
