Federal grant for students goes up
Posted on Saturday, August 16, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/234363/
The reauthorization of the Higher Education Act promises increases in maximum Pell grant awards at a time when financial aid applications in Arkansas and the nation are rising.
President Bush signed the act’s renewal Thursday, the first major reauthorization in a decade.
The Pell grant is for low-income students who are seeking a first bachelor’s degree.
The maximum award, currently $ 4, 731 for the fall and spring semesters, would jump to $ 6, 000 next year and to $ 8, 000 by the 2014-15 school year if appropriations match the authorized amounts.
“That’s going to really help the neediest of students,” said Kattie Wing, financial aid director for the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Wing recalls a number of flat years for the Pell grants before Congress approved a slight increase for 2007-08.
The act doesn’t focus solely on the students, though.
“For colleges and universities that raise tuition, there’s more accountability that’s going to be expected,” said Rick Stripling, vice chancellor for student affairs at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.
“It is an 1, 158-page document,” said Stripling, who like other financial aid directors, is fielding applications at a peak time of the year. “It is going to take some time and training to understand it.”
The new law also requires the U. S. Department of Education to create a Web site so students can research college pricing trends and find schools eligible for federal aid and loans.
The law has provisions allowing qualified students to take out two Pell grants in a year to accelerate progress toward a degree, Wing said.
Arkansas saw a 21 percent increase in prospective students filing federal student aid forms in the first half of 2008 compared with the same period the previous year, said Meihua Zhai, a spokesman for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
That amounted to 75, 639 Arkansas students who sought various forms of aid through the form known as FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
The state’s increase outpaced the country’s.
Nationally, 8. 9 million prospective students filed aid applications during the same period, a 16. 3 percent increase, Zhai said.
The Fayetteville campus had 2, 811 Pell recipients last school year, Wing said. Of just under 14, 000 undergraduate students that year, about 7, 300 completed the FAFSA form.
The ASU System typically processes about 14, 000 FAFSA applications in the fall for its main Jonesboro campus, as well as its Mountain Home and Newport campuses, Stripling said. Most recently the system’s students received $ 82 million from all sources of federal and private aid.
At the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, officials have offered 2, 491 prospective students $ 9. 37 million in Pell grants for this fall and next spring, said Cheryl C. Lyons, financial aid director.
Typically, not all the prospects show up to collect their grant awards, she said. For fall 2007 and this spring and summer, UCA gave 3, 054 students Pell grants worth nearly $ 10. 1 million.
So far for the coming school year, UCA has received 10, 564 FAFSA applications. Last school year, 11, 942 applications came in.
Stripling said that he will welcome increased Pell grants, because when grants don’t keep up with costs, students tend to leave college in deeper debt.
“The loans is where they’re finishing it up,” he said, adding loan business has risen significantly in recent years.
Loan volumes have increased at UCA too, Lyons said, but one factor in that is higher student numbers.
“Until last year, the loan limits had not increased,” she said, referring to federal limits on maximum annual and aggregate amounts on the federal loans a student can take out. “So, more and more students were maxing out on their loans.”
“The Pell grant is great, but it has stayed relatively low for so long,” Lyons said. Should the federal funds for the increases flow, students will be “thrilled,” she added.
The appropriated maximum amount typically lags behind the authorized amount, cautions Congressional Research Service. The two have been equal only three times during the Pell grant program’s history, in federal fiscal years 1975, 1976 and 1979.
“In all other years, the appropriated maximum has been less than the authorized maximum,” according to the service, which is part of the Library of Congress.
The new act also calls for a streamlined FAFSA, taking the 11-page financial aid application down to two pages.
Stripling said the long form “can be intimidating in some ways,” and he has seen prospective students thwarted at times when divorced or separated parents can’t agree whose income they’ll report on the form.
“I think anytime you can make the application easier, it is more customer-friendly,” Stripling said. “Not many of us want to fill out a long form.”