Thank you.
Wow. There's a lot to say about these two programs as well.
Over the last month, we have seen how hard hit young people have been by the pandemic. Quite frankly, there's a real risk that if we don't take significant action, this will have a generational impact on our young people. We still have higher youth unemployment rates than average. There is reduced participation in post-secondary education among lower-income students. We've seen how the pandemic has disproportionately affected our students who face systemic barriers, including indigenous youth and youth with disabilities.
That's why we put in place our COVID student response package. I'm proud to say that the emergency student benefit supported over 700,000 students, and the Canada student loan program helped more than two million students. We did about 150,000 job placements through our enhanced measures. That's what we're continuing.
The youth employment and skills strategy focuses on students who face additional barriers to participation in the workforce and provides them with supports. We are torquing that up.
For Canada summer jobs, of course, everybody here is familiar with that program. We see how every year it's oversubscribed. We think there's a need to even have more summer jobs available next year, and that's exactly what we're doing.
With these two programs, we're supporting both the students who are job-ready and looking for work through Canada summer jobs, and the students who need a little more help, are more marginalized and face more barriers, by supporting them with wraparound supports to succeed in work.