Pell grants slip for area students
Revised criteria make some families ineligible, force reliance on loans
BY SARA INÉS CALDERÓN
The Brownsville Herald
January 9,2006 - In December 2004, the federal government changed the way it assessed financial need for 1.5 million students receiving Pell grants.
One year later, the number of students at University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College who receive these grants fell by 9 percent, while the amount students borrow in loans increased by $3 million.
“The students in this area cannot go to school unless they have aid,” said Mari Chapa, UTB-TSC financial director. “That is just a fact of life down here.”
In 2004, of the 80 percent of students receiving financial aid at UTB, 59 percent were receiving Pell grants. A year later, the num-ber of these students receiving Pell grants in the fall semester fell by 9 percent, Chapa said. The university currently enrolls more than 13,000 students.
“What are students having to do?” she said. “They are having to go into loans. What is affecting us is not only that the formula changed and lowered the eligibility criteria for some students, but also the fact that tuition and fees have continued to increase.”
Pell grants are the largest single source of grant aid for undergraduate students provided by the federal government. Recipients are lower income students.
What changed in December 2004 was the way financial need was assessed, based on state tax tables, according to a U.S. Depart-ment of Education official. This made some families that had previously been eligible for the need-based Pell grants ineligible.
About 90,000 students nationwide lost their grants, and another 1.5 million had their grants reduced with the 2004 changes, ac-cording to the American Council on Education. From 2004 to 2005, 24,000 students lost their Pell grants, according to a report pre-pared by the Congressional Research Service. This was the first drop in the number of students receiving the grants in several years; the number had been growing steadily since 1999.
“In many states, the state tax percentage went down, so families had more money available,” said Jane Glickman, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education.
“If you pay less in state taxes and you have more disposable income, then your eligibility for Pell grants goes down,” Glickman said. The department was legally mandated to use the updated tables; it was a decision that is part of how the department works with the federal bureaucracy.
“These are annual tax tables that the law requires us to use,” she said.
Currently, the maximum Pell grant a student can receive is $4,050, the minimum is $400. These amounts have been constant since 2002. There has not been an increase in the Pell grants since that time.
Combined with increasing college costs, Hispanic and low-income students — like many students in the Valley — are the hardest hit, according to one Hispanic advocacy organization.
“We obviously are very concerned that this is going to have a major impact on our community nationwide, especially in lower-income areas of the country,” said Dr. Antonio Flores of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), a group of higher education institutions committed to supporting Hispanics in higher education.
“Places like the Valley where we have very, very high concentrations of Hispanics and lower family incomes than other parts of the country, the impact is going to be very real,” Flores said.
The Pell grants have traditionally been the “cornerstone” of student financial aid for Hispanics, Flores said, especially for lower-income students, which many Hispanics tend to be.
“The Pell grant has presented a tremendous boost for educational opportunities for Latinos,” Flores said. “It is going to be a very real challenge for many of those families to be able to cover college costs without having to borrow more or work more — or both.”
Because Hispanic students tend to be lower-income, they often have to work more hours while they study or take time off from school, thus taking longer to finish, Flores said. When the Pell grant program began awarding money to undergraduate students, the funding covered up to 80 percent of the costs of an education, Flores said. These days, the money may only cover up to 40 percent.
While Pell grants have remained constant, inflation has increased, and in Texas colleges and universities now have the ability to raise tuition at-will, further complicating the task of funding an undergraduate education for Hispanics in the state.
“The state deregulated the tuition, so now the schools can charge basically whatever they want,” said Chapa of UTB. “The buying power of the Pell grant is just not there anymore, so they (students) are having to go into loans. We’ve increased by 1,000 in loan borrowers.”
She said an increase in Pell grants for this year seems quite unlikely.
“UTB is still one of the lowest tuitions in the state, but if that (loans) is all a student qualifies for, it is not enough to pay for all the fees,” Chapa explained.
What her financial aid office has tried to do to compensate is emphasize scholarships and sending the Free Application for Fed-eral Student Aid, the document that determines financial need, in for the priority deadline of March 1. The university also will be promoting financial aid programs all during the month of February, which is financial aid awareness month.
