Paying for college is an issue faced by parents today virtually from the moment of their child’s birth. And where parents can only partially help or not help at all, many students entering college face complex decisions about how to pay for their education, from applying for scholarships and grants to low-interest student loans from the federal government. Total financial packages put together by institutions can be difficult to understand, let alone manage. In recent generations, demand for (what would come to be called) postsecondary education of all forms continues to increase in large part because of money being made available by the government to offset some or all of the financial burden of college. Access to college has come a long way especially within the last century because of several key events that caused a major shift in attitude about higher education, though issues of access and affordability continue to arise.
College Scholarship Services and the Higher Education Act of 1965:
In some instances, colleges and universities took initiative to evaluate and compare their systems of financial aid to establish some uniformity of practice to better understand how to deal with the needs of their students. The College Scholarship Service of 1954 was a board of private institutions designed to remove the individual student’s financial considerations when selecting where to attend in favor of providing aid commensurate with need. Moreover, financial aid would be provided based on academic prowess, a predecessor to today’s politically popular, state-sponsored merit-based scholarships. Less talented but deserving students could still qualify for money and admission to less selective schools. At state-supported schools, a kind of hierarchy developed that separated institutions into the elite universities, state colleges, and junior colleges. The College Scholarship Service established models of high and low tuition to aid ratios that were ideal in theory but were largely never accomplished. Many institutions were simply ill equipped to handle the needs of all their students.
The federal government officially entered the student loan arena in 1958. Not only was the demand for access to college increasing, but a report from 1947 called the President’s Commission on Higher Education had revived the debate in Congress in time for the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which was a program of low-interest student loans (to become the Perkins Loan) provided in response to concerns that the United States was falling behind in fields of science and engineering. The scare was caused by the Soviet launch of Sputnik which, combined with the war on poverty, provided for the government a kind of back entrance into the arena of federal student aid (Archibald 2002).
Of the eight titles of the Higher Education Act of 1965, only Title IV addressed assistance to students, and initially it took a back seat to institutional aid. Title IV established Educational Opportunity Grants based on institutions aggressively pursuing students with “exceptional financial need” (Gladieux and Hauptman 1995). The Guaranteed Student Loan Program (to become the Stafford Loan) was designed to appeal more to middle-income students by providing loan subsidies; the government paid interest accrued during the student’s collegiate career and paid the difference between a set low interest rate and the market rate after graduation. It was, however, in 1972 with the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act that Congress rounded out the program to form what is the “basic charter of today’s federal student aid system” (Gladieux and Hauptman 1995). Out of the heated debates about the program there emerged new language, new types of assistance, expanded opportunity grants, and more incentives for the states. The term “postsecondary education” replaced “higher education” in order to expand aid to students entering junior colleges as well as trade schools and career colleges. During a congressional session in 1980, the Pell Grant (named after Senator Claiborne Pell) emerged from the Basic Economic Opportunity Grants; it was larger than its predecessors and designed to encourage students from low-income situations to attend college. Eligibility for Pell Grants is based on a family’s total income and assets. Finally, the State Student Incentive Grant Program, which also originated with the 1972 Higher Education Act, offered matching funds to states to encourage their need-based aid programs, and within three years all fifty states actively participated in this program (Archibald 2002).
No comments:
Post a Comment