Guide to Education Grants

Another Student Loan Resource:
“I’m grateful for any federal funding, but in terms of affecting large numbers of students, it hasn’t had a huge impact on our campus,” said David Gelinas, University of the South’s director of financial aid, as reported in a Dec. 14, 2006 article by Doug Lederman titled “Are Students Getting SMART?” that appeared in Inside Higher Ed.
 
Gelinas stated that his institution only had four SMART Grant recipients and about 36 Academic Competitiveness Grants awarded, the article reported. While it may be too early to tell, many schools are reporting similar challenges and low numbers of recipients in the first few months of the program. Overall the consensus appears to be that colleges “were having trouble finding enough students who met all the qualifications” for the grants.
 
Financial Aid Officials Give Feedback
 
Executive dean of student services at Des Moines Area Community College, Laurie Wolf, mentioned that less than one percent of her school’s 28,000 students qualified for the Academic Competitiveness Grants, according to Lederman’s article. “That’s just not a lot of students,” she said. She further explained that her institution has gone through extensive efforts to attempt to identify “eligible recipients of the Academic Competitiveness Grants,” and that qualification and distribution efforts have proved difficult, according to the article.
 
Barmak Nassirian, the associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission Officers, gave another relevant example. Washington state’s Everett Community College that awarded more than 1,100 Pell Grants has only three Academic Competitiveness Grant recipients, the article said. Nassirian said, “ ‘The administrative burden and the effort involved in getting the ACG into the hands of the three students may outweigh’ the value to those students,” Lederman reported. This sentiment is one reflected in the challenges experienced by Wolf at Des Moines Area Community College.
 
The grants, which target students from low-income families who are pursuing degrees in such fields as linguistics, science and technology, have received some positive acclaim. According to the article, Ellen Frishberg, who is the director of student financial services at Maryland’s Johns Hopkins University, said her school awarded 128 Academic Competitiveness Grants and 55 SMART Grants.
 
While Frishberg does not address the effort taken to disburse the grants, her university has greatly benefited from the program, as suggested by the number of student recipients. “The targeting [of the programs toward science and other high-demand fields] makes total sense. This is the place I want to give poor kids more grant money,” she said.
 
Initial Projections Confirm Programs May Be Underutilized
 
According to the article, the Department of Education unveiled data confirming the grant programs were not being used as much as previously hoped. David Bergeron, director of the policy and budget development staff at the Education Department’s Office of Postsecondary Education, conceded that the projected grant recipient total figure of $686 million for 2007 falls short of the $790 million appropriated by Congress, but does not indicate a problem. “For all of us concerned about getting more grant aid to low income students, to the extent [the programs] seem to be doing that, we’re happy,” he said.
 
Talk to the education financial advisors at NextStudent. They have all the information and advice you need on student loans. Check out www.nextstudent.com.
 
Be sure to tune in next Tuesday for my next blog about this week in student loans.
 
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