"Millions of college students will have to shoulder more of the cost of their education under federal rules imposed late last month through a bureaucratic adjustment requiring neither Congressional approval nor public comment of any kind," The New York Times reports. "The changes, only a slight alteration in the formula governing financial aid, are expected to diminish the government's contribution to higher education by hundreds of millions of dollars, starting in the fall of 2004. But they will also have a ripple effect across almost every level of financial aid, shrinking the pool of students who qualify for federal awards, tightening access to billions of dollars in state and institutional grants and, in turn, heightening the reliance on loans to pay for college."
The Times writes that "Several Democratic members of Congress [Friday] called for the suspension of a bureaucratic adjustment that will likely increase college costs for millions of families." Senator Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) introduced such legislation, while Rep. George Miller (D-Cal.) said he would introduce his own bill, as did Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) if President Bush did not "stop this change dead in its tracks."
Joe Paul Case, dean of financial aid at Amherst College, told the Times that "The seemingly insignificant publishing of an obscure table in the Federal Register has serious consequences on the individual."
According to ED, the problem stems from using IRS data that is at least three years old, when state taxes were much lower than they are now. Campus critics call the changes "a backdoor way to cut education spending," but the Times notes that "Federal law requires that it update the tax tables periodically, and the data from which it draws comes directly from the Internal Revenue Service." ED told the Associated Press "it was simply executing its responsibilities under federal law [and] there is little it can do to remedy the situation."
The Associated Press reported that "The Education Department said that the potential loss of financial aid could be partly offset by other alterations in the formula with regard to family income and assets." Sally Stroup, assistant secretary for postsecondary education, told the AP "We don't believe this is going to result in any significant changes." She said there was no immediate estimate of the impact on middle-class families or how much they might lose in financial aid. "It really depends on the family, how many kids are in the family, where you live and how many kids are in college," she said. "It's a complicated formula and takes a lot into consideration in figuring the family income calculation." Stroup also told the Times that the changes in the formula will result in more aid to the low-income recipients of Pell Grants.
NASFAA Director for Research Ken Redd told the Times that "The way those students will make up the difference is that they'll work more, going to college half time and working part time. It's not that they won't go to college, it'll just take them an extra year or two to finish, if they finish at all."
[The information in this article came from New York Times articles Change in Aid Formula Shifts More Costs to Students and Democrats Want to Suspend a Change in Student Aid Rule plus the Associated Press article Legislators to Fight Financial Aid Change. The Times articles require free site registration. Please note that news sources have widely varying guidelines on how long articles are available on-line. If you attempt to access an article and receive a "not found" message, it is likely that the article has been removed from the site.]
Posted June 16, 2003 on www.NASFAA.org, Web Site of the
National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators
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