"First came Covid. Then came online college. Then came the lawsuits. There’s a firm in South Carolina, the Anastopoulo Law Firm, that says it’s suing some 30 higher learning institutions for tuition and board payback (including Columbia, Cornell, Purdue, UMass and UPenn) arguing breach of contract—saying in effect that these institutions charged students for a certain type of college campus experience this year and instead gave them virtual college lite. The lawsuits challenge the notion that Zoom learning lives up to the value of an actual classroom—learning in a community, with your peers, enjoying personal development," Financial Advisor reports. 

"Still, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to test the United States’ anxiety for reopening society, the question of reopening colleges arises, too, and asks—at what cost in people’s health and safety?"

..."In March, President Trump signed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which suspended student loan payments and temporarily paused interest rates on loans at zero. In early August, the program was extended until the end of 2020. The law also said that colleges could roll federal work-study money over into Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (FSEOG).

The CARES Act also tried to solve some problems by earmarking $12.5 billion to colleges, half of which they must award in emergency financial aid grants to students to help them pay for online learning, food, course materials, housing, health care and technology. The aid was designed to help colleges with more students in need; 75% of it was allocated to colleges based on how many Pell Grant recipients they had, while 25% of the money went to schools based on their number of full-time non-Pell Grant recipients.

But the funds focused mostly on items related to campus life disruption in the pandemic. Megan Coval, vice president of policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said the universities had flexibility in how they determined which students were going to get the CARES grants, and it might seem arbitrary or unfair to some students who got turned down or found resources depleted quickly. 'They could only give grants to students who experienced an expense due to the campus disruption because of Covid-19,' Coval says. 'When you unpack that a little bit—and the [Department of Education] was clear about the implementation here—if you think about it, an expense is different from need. If a student came up and said ‘Well, my parents lost their job.’ … That’s not an expense because campus shut down.'"

....“'Our schools have definitely indicated that they are busier than ever,'" says Coval, at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. 'A big part of what they’re hearing from students and families is that right now, when you fill out the FAFSA, you put in two years’ prior income, so there’s many people who are saying ‘Hey, my income from two years ago is not where it is now. It’s not even where it was six months ago before this started.’ So what’s on my FAFSA form and what generates the [expected family contribution] and what aid a student gets is no longer accurate for me. So schools are dealing with going through those' in the form of appeals and adjustments."

NASFAA's "Notable Headlines" section highlights media coverage of financial aid to help members stay up to date with the latest news. Articles included under the notable headlines section are not written by NASFAA, but rather by external sources. Inclusion in Today's News does not imply endorsement of the material or guarantee the accuracy of information presented.

Publication Date: 9/1/2020