Posted on 05/03/2006 12:03:19 PM PDT by JSedreporter
Over the years, politicians and, especially, college and university administrators, have led us to believe that federal aid to education was a ticket out of poverty, but that may be just another urban legend.
“The more money a college-bound student’s family makes, the more likely he or she is to apply for federal financial aid, electronic records show,” Kara Wedekind of the Capital News Service writes. “It’s a situation that some experts say is caused by families scared off by college costs, even as the federal financial aid application deadline passed Monday.”
“Dependent students in the lowest income bracket submitted fewer federal financial aid applications in 2003 than their wealthier counterparts at 26 out of 31 four-year schools in Maryland,” Wedekind writes. “At each higher income level, more students applied for assistance, according to data from The Institute for College Access and Success, a research organization that studies higher education.”
“The dependent annual family income levels were divided into three groups: less than $30,000, $30,000 to $60,000 and more than $60,000.” The break that students can get from aid packages that include a federal subsidy is considerable, particularly when one-year’s tuition and fees can range anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000. “For schools in the University system of Maryland, a Board of Regents report notes that the federal government chipped in 61 percent of all financial aid in 2004,” Wedekind writes.
“Only rubes pay the sticker price,” Harvard economist Susan Dynarski told the crowd at the American Enterprise Institute two months ago. She backed off of this assertion a bit when an audience member took offense at the characterization as elitist.
Nevertheless, some data do show a considerable difference between the “sticker price” of college and the amount actually forked over to the front office by the student’s family, particularly when the kinfolk are well-heeled. “Everyone knows the retail price of Penn is out of sight,” Dan Akst writes on MSN.com. “But not everyone knows that three-quarters of its undergraduates get some kind of financial aid and nearly half get an outright grant (read: discount).”
“At Penn, for example, undergraduate tuition and fees this fall are $39,634,” Akst explains. “But the university says the average undergraduate gets a discount of 25 percent. And that figure only takes account of scholarships from Penn or governmental sources. If you add in private grants and the value of low-interest loans, the average price would drop even further.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
Anyone else hate Sallie Mae?
College Education Ping list.
Let JamesP81, Jalisco555, or myself know if you want on or off the college ping list.
Why don't they just figure what a fair price is without all the financial aid, charge that, and stop all the games?They should give financial aid to those who really need it and who would not be attending otherwise.
One of my father's pet peeves were those families with several children in private schools or colleges who would request financial aid and then take everyone out to Vail to ski over spring break.
I was smart enough to earn scholarships, but my father always insisted on letting the truly needy use the scholarship funds.
Colleges charge as much as they can because they are subsidized by the federal government.
Those who know the system will milk the system..
Wow - Penn a bargain at $30K tuition and fees ? /sarc
Add in board and other incidentals and the cost, even with the 25% discount, is over $40k a year.
I don't know about all of you but to me that's still a lot of money to get indoctrinated for 4 years.
One of my pet peeves is the incredible opaqueness of college finances. College charges continue to rise at twice the CPI yet it is impossible for most of us to determine what the actual costs of a college education really are. The structure of most colleges is extremely complex, the sources of income are varied and difficult to keep straight and who knows what they are really spending and on what. No business could be run the way colleges and universities are run. This is a scandal waiting to explode and when it does all those parents who have been forced to begin saving since before their children are even born just to pay for college will be furious.
If people in the lowest income bracket were able to understand and decipher all the various grants and aid available, I daresay they wouldn't have been in the lowest income bracket to begin with. Reading comprehension, motivation and yes, even intelligence do come into play here, on both sides of the equation.
I don't think so. When your income gets above a certain level, there is no way you will get any aid. Unless she equates "wealthy" with "rube". I imagine the number of people who pay the full amount at, let's say, the top 25 colleges, is pretty high.
People who don't have a lot of money aren't savvy and may not ask for aid. The more wealthy figure, "Hey, if they are giving it away, no harm asking!"
Look at the Universities administrative budget and compare that with the budgets of each college. Then, look within each colleges budget at its own administrative expenses.
Filling out a FAFSA form isn't exactly rocket science.
She's right about that, check out fafsa.gov
Interesting.. academic incest.. and probably featherbedding too..
That's misleading at best.
There are different types of federal financial aid. The general types are the following.
There are grants in which the money is given to students for educational expenses and does not need to be repaid.
There are direct loans in which the government is the lender, the student pays no interest on the loan while the student is attending school full time, and the interest rates are subsidized to be lower than market rates.
Then there are loans where the the money is loaned by a private institution, but the government pays the interest while the student is in school full time. The government also guarantees that the loan will be repaid if the student defaults on the loan, which helps subsidize lower interest rates.
Then there are "unsubsidized" loans where the government only acts to guarantee the loans. Interest still accrues while the student is in school and is paid by the student, not the government. They are still subsidized by the fact that the government guarantees repayment which results in lower interest rates.
A student who receives grants receives a lot of assistance. A student who receives an unsubsidized loan receives very little assistance.
If you family has a middle class income, don't expect much in the way of grants. The assistance you will likely receive is in the form of having the government pay the interest on a portion of your debt while you are in school, and even the amount of loans they will guarantee is limited significantly by your income.
It's also kind of important to notice that in this article, there's no mention of who receives the federal aid, merely who submits the most applications.
It's not even clear if the comments about less students from lower incomes applying for aid is referring to statistics on the number of students or the percentage of students.
There's no question that the majority of college students come from families with higher incomes. However, it's not a lack of finical aid opportunities that is keeping the percentages of poorer young people who attend college low.
In general poorer people place less value on education, and not just college education. It is extremely difficult for a child that doesn't have the support of family pushing them to succeed to get a good education as they grow up. In poor communities it's also less likely that their peers in school will value education, so there's more pressure to take school less seriously and less pressure to learn.
By the time they are in high school, and are getting to the point where they may start making more important life decisions on their own, they are years behind where they should be and could be if they had received the encouragement, support and discipline they needed as they went through school.
It is very difficult for them to catch up.
Colleges have tried to address this by having sliding admissions standards based on income and race, teaching college classes on material that should have been learned early in high school, and giving students the opportunity to catch up. They have also to some extent lowered education standards. In some fields it's been lowered a little, in others it's been lowered a lot.
To some extent it's just meant that it's easier to pass classes, but still difficult to get high grades. However, teachers do need to teach to the level of their students to a considerable extent, and lower standards means lowering the pressure on students who could do better if challenged to do so.
At the same time, if you provide opportunities there will always be those who make good use of them, and there are those who use these opportunities to excel and to make their lives better and encourage others that they can also do so.
Upwards mobility and hope for a better future are extremely important aspects for a free society. However, it's not for a society if the process by which you are giving people more opportunities is lowering the quality of your educations system as a whole.
The key to giving people opportunities is to start as early as possible.
We need a good public educations system that rewards success. We need to drastically limit the power of teacher's unions, if not abolish them. We need to hold teachers accountable but not allow the government to bury them in regulations and push politically motivated programs on our youth. The reason that the teachers might need unions is the incompetence of big government, however unions usually end up having the same goals as big government.
Therefore you don't solve the problem by limiting unions through more government. You restrict the unions and the government. You require that the schools and educators be held accountable, but restrict the government from being able to micromanage things.
Excellent job, fellow Ohioan.
What is on Fafsa that shows she's right? I know a good number of folks who couldn't get a penny exactly because of the Fafsa. Unless they cheated and lied. (If they catch you doing it, good luck.You have to take the info from your 1040 and if you are honest, you will receive nothing once you get past a certain income. I'm not sure what that number is, but there is a cap.
"WARNING: You must fill out this form accurately. The information that you supply can be verified by your college, your state, or by the U.S. Department of Education. You may be asked to provide U.S. income tax returns, the worksheets in this booklet and other information. If you can't or don't provide these records to your college, you may not get Federal student aid. If you get Federal student aid based on incorrect information, you will have to pay it back; you may also have to pay fines and fees. If you purposely give false or misleading information on your application, you may be fined $20,000, sent to prison, or both."
Schools audit anywhere from 30 to 100% of their Fafsa applications.
Well, let's leave it at this, we have a 6-figure household income and got about $5k knocked off the $20k tuition. Fill it out carefully.
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