Before addressing these issues, however, it is useful to have a sense of the level of financial need among graduate students. To be eligible for OSAP, a student must have a parental permanent address in Ontario, have attended an Ontario high school, or have been resident for at least 12 months in Ontario not as a full-time student. It is also sent to all SGS registrants who are in receipt of OSAP at the OSAP maximum. With the various caveats, we can give the following picture of OSAP- defined need at the graduate level. Financial assistance for graduate students in the doctoral stream, however, is not based on considerations of need alone.
Doctoral studies constitute for most students the first stage of an academic career.
Doctoral students are hence in a sense junior academic colleagues, who contribute in important ways to the research mission of the University. As in the case of academic colleagues more generally, the University of Toronto is in competition with other research-intensive universities in North America and elsewhere for outstanding doctoral students. Weighted enrolment means that only master's students in the first two years of the program and doctoral students in the first four years of the program are counted. Furthermore, master's students are counted as one and doctoral students as two. In 1997, the decision was made to allocate the funds to departments as global dollar amounts, giving departments the flexibility to distribute these funds in whatever packages were most appropriate for their students.