Actually I think it's about $3,000 maximum on the loan side, and there's a grant also up to $8,000. An initial analysis of this suggests that they're actually not using all of that money.
There are a number of students in post-secondary education who report that their needs are not met. I'm trying desperately to remember the numbers off the top of my head. It was a relatively small number, tens of thousands of students, compared to what it might be.
It seems that the bigger issue in post-secondary education is actually the accessibility of the learning environment, that there are some things that students need that they actually can't just buy themselves. If you go into a lab and you need some special modification in that lab equipment, students can't just modify the lab with their own money or access to the grant. There may be personal aids also that they can't provide themselves or can't always bring into the classroom. So those are some issues that need to be addressed. There are other issues about accessibility in the post-secondary environment that I think we aren't quite able to reach with the individual grants and loans.
The other thing again is that people with disabilities tend to take a little longer, on average, so some of the financial assistance that we offer is conditional on full-time participation, not available to part-time students, and many times students with disabilities would rather be in a part-time situation in order to be able to manage the workload.
I know that my colleagues responsible for student financial assistance have been discussing those kinds of modifications that would make it so that the system may be worked a little bit better, but on the financial assistance front it looks like we actually are providing the right amounts of money. There's a small change that we could make, but in general it looks like it's more about the institutional environment that needs more modification in order to be more accessible to people with disabilities.