Equality of Outcomes in Education: A Case Study of Structural Injustice at U of T
- Dick Gariepy
- Aug 20
- 7 min read
Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey
I aim to highlight that the presence of accessibility services and emergency funds from the registrar's office does not automatically mean that classroom conditions are fair. It does not ensure that all students have equal chances to excel in evaluations and that these assessments truly reflect their knowledge. The assumption that the classroom offers a level playing field just because support is accessible, and making students who do not access these resources responsible for their underperformance may over state the effectiveness of support services and underestimate the genuine requirements of those at a disadvantage.
Equality of opportunity looks great on a brochure. Equality of outcome shows up in a life. It sounds simple because it is. Getting in is the invitation. Finishing with safety, health, and a degree is the proof. I entered the University of Toronto like everyone else—admitted on paper, hopeful in practice. I brought drive, decent grades, and a tight budget. I also brought a real safety history and no family backstop. The question wasn’t whether the door would open. The question was whether the structure behind that door would actually let me learn, live, and graduate on equal footing. The answer arrived in the outcome: a withdrawal, a body running on fumes, and a tidy offer of travel money to help me leave. If irony paid tuition, I would have stayed for a master’s.
People make a big deal out of “opportunity,” as if the acceptance letter settles the moral score. It doesn’t. Opportunity clears a path on paper. Outcome tells you if the path was walkable for a human being, not a hypothetical one. In plain terms: did the student sleep safely, eat reliably, study with a steady mind, sit exams under fair conditions, and finish? If the answer is yes for some students and no for others in predictable ways, then the structure is sorting people by circumstance, not talent. . If you mean it about equal opportunity, then you care about equal results, because results are what people live with.
Residence life set the tone. I joined the Student Housing Advisory Committee because I believed “advisory” meant decisions would listen to facts. Meetings drifted toward the familiar script about feasibility and budget seasons. My unit told a simpler truth: holes in the walls, taped electrical covers, a leak that kept leaking, hardware surrendering to gravity. During a meeting in October 2023 I described my room in the only language that matched the conditions. I called it a crap hole. That frankness flipped the agenda. The focus moved from fixing a broken unit to fixing my tone. I was told the word didn’t belong in SHAC and the subtext arrived quickly: consider removing me from the committee if I kept naming things plainly. The building could stay broken; my vocabulary could not. I got frustrated because I was being managed, not helped, and because “respect” was being defined as speaking softly around problems that yelled on their own.
I filed a formal complaint right after. The complaint did two jobs. First, it documented the physical conditions with dates, work-order steps, and the effect on sleep and study. Second, it documented the October 27 meeting as a governance problem: attempted removal from an advisory role for saying, on the record, what anyone could see. I asked for basic remedies that fit real life. Fix the unit to a verifiable standard on a short timeline. Put in writing that punishing a student for blunt criticism chills participation and undermines the point of an advisory body. Create a process that protects hard truths in the room, because “we value student voice” means very little if the only acceptable voice is pleasant. The official response arrived polished and empty. Staff acted appropriately. Values were affirmed. Inclusion was declared. No repair timeline. No acknowledgement that pressuring a student off a committee for naming a problem is retaliation dressed as etiquette. The file moved. The room did not. The complaint became a case number and a lesson in optics.
Campus safety repeated the pattern, just with higher stakes. A family member who had used “wellness checks” as a control tactic tried again. Peel Regional Police called the university. Campus police confirmed details about me—enough to light up my location. For someone who moved provinces to stay out of reach, that kind of confirmation is a flare shot into the night. I wrote to explain why this was dangerous and to ask for a hard stop on sharing anything about me. The answers sounded careful but missed the point. I was told my information would remain confidential “with Peel and Campus Safety.” That’s a sentence trying to reassure me while admitting the very pipeline that put me at risk. When I asked if they had confirmed my residence, I got a flat denial that contradicted what I was told on the phone. The result was simple: a system designed for a “standard” student treated me like that standard exists. Safety that moves in the wrong direction is a liability, not a service. Equal access to a phone number is meaningless if using it makes one student safer and another student more exposed.
The classroom brought the issue into sharp focus. One course used a one-hour, closed-book exam that rewarded speed and calm more than understanding. I asked for an adjustment because the surrounding chaos—housing problems, safety anxiety, actual hunger—made it hard to perform in a tight window. The professor declined. The reasoning was straightforward and, frankly, textbook neoliberal gobbledygook: campus resources exist; if you are struggling, it’s your job to use them; if you didn’t perform at your best, that’s on you. It was policy as pep talk, with the bill sent to the student. The assumption behind it was that resources on a website equal access in a life, and that the only variable left is personal hustle. That story flatters institutions and punishes reality. It ignores the time and energy required to navigate ten offices while you are already underwater. It ignores the way “help” often lives behind appointments, documentation hoops, and delays that turn emergencies into autopsies. I wasn’t asking for a free pass. I was asking for an assessment that measured knowledge once the preventable friction had been removed. The refusal kept the friction and called it fairness. That is a policy choice, not a fact of nature.
Money rounded out the picture. “Emergency funds” existed but flowed to internal accounts rather than to my actual needs. Ledgers looked better; dinners did not. Then, when I withdrew in March 2024—after weeks of trying to hold it all together—the university found almost seven hundred dollars for a travel grant so I could get back to Alberta. No cash for food when staying. Plenty of cash for leaving. It was efficient and revealing. The system could move fast for an exit it preferred. It could not move fast for a fix I needed. That is what I mean by outcome over opportunity. The numbers tell you the priorities.
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People love to talk about resilience at moments like this. I had it. My grades held while other things fell apart. The truth is more basic than inspirational posters. Students finish when a few pieces are in place: a room that works, safety that protects, small direct cash when the floor drops, and assessments that test learning rather than test how well you can outrun stress. Take away any of those and the odds of finishing go down. Take away several and the finish line moves out of reach. You don’t need a task force to see it. You need to follow the day of a real student and count how many roadblocks are entirely optional.
So here is the straightforward part about what would make this fair. Start with housing that passes a simple check before anyone is allowed to move in. Fix what is broken first, then hand over keys. Treat location as sensitive information by default, and share nothing with outside agencies unless the student gives clear, revocable consent, except where the law forces a disclosure. Put emergency aid in the student’s hands the day they ask, not in an account they can’t touch. Make assessment formats that protect rigor while removing speed traps. Offer time-flexible options upfront so students don’t have to beg while their life is on fire. And if you want student “voice,” attach a budget and decision rights to it so it becomes more than a calendar invite. None of this requires a revolution. It requires a choice to put outcomes first and then to measure them in the open.
The common objections have simple answers. “Resources are limited.” Sure. Spend where the return is obvious: food, stability, and fair testing cost less than attrition, reputational damage, and crisis management. “We already protect privacy.” Test it with mystery calls and publish the results. If information still leaks, fix the pipe. “We treat everyone the same.” That is exactly the problem. Schedules, bodies, and risks are not the same. Equal rules can produce unequal results when people start from different places. Fairness means aiming for equal results where it counts—safety, learning, completion—and adjusting inputs until the numbers move.
Withdrawing was not a preference. It was a survival decision at the end of a long string of preventable failures. I said as much in my emails. I talked about exclusion and barriers that felt impossible to climb. I also watched how fast the system could act when the action aligned with its habits—approve the travel grant, close the file, move on. The better version of this story is also the simpler one. Keep students fed. Keep them safe. Test what they actually learned. Remove the nonsense that burns their time. When something goes wrong, repair it quickly and cleanly, in active voice, with something tangible attached.
Universities have a duty of care that extends beyond letting you in. The duty lives in the unglamorous mechanics of a day: locks that work, information that stays where it should, cash that buys dinner now, and exams that test knowledge once noise is lowered to a normal level. If those pieces are in place, students finish. If they are missing, some students finish and others don’t, and the pattern will look a lot like the patterns you already know. That is the point. Outcome is the truth. Opportunity is the invitation. Justice is when the invitation and the outcome match.
For the record, the documents exist. I wrote the complaint to housing. I wrote the emails to campus police about the wellness check mess. I wrote to Student Affairs before and after withdrawing. The NYU Metro Center has plain-language reporting on the way marginalized students face extra barriers and need supports that actually move. Anne Phillips wrote years ago that if you care about opportunity, you care about outcome. None of this is news. It just needs to be done. The next student who drags a suitcase into residence deserves an ordinary success story, not a crash course in institutional endurance. Build the ordinary. Make it boring in the best way. Then hand out diplomas that mean what the brochure promised.
Thick Thought Thumper of the Week----> "Equal At The Exit"
these are pdfs of email exchanges between my self and the university of Toronto employees regarding the issues discussed in this post.
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