Texas Scholarship Program Out of Money
A year ago, a state scholarship program was so flush with money that a senator lugged an oversized check around Texas, begging eligible students to apply.
Now, the same program, known as the TEXAS Grant, is so short on cash that nearly 30,000 students this year won't get the scholarship they earned. That's nearly a third of the 90,296 new and returning students who qualified, according to the state.
And next school year could be even worse.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board says the grant program is sinking under the weight of budget cuts, tuition hikes and more qualified, returning students than expected.
"For new students, I can't say it's the end of the program, but it's on hiatus, until the next [legislative] session," said Lois Hollis, the coordinating board's assistant commissioner of student services. "This is at a crisis stage."
The Legislature created the Toward Excellence Access & Success Grant in 1999 as an incentive to get more needy Texans to attend and finish college.
The law's pitch: If students complete a college preparatory track, known as the Recommended High School Curriculum, and show financial need, the state would pick up the tab for tuition and fees at a public university or community college or defray part of the cost at a private school. The grants' value can be several thousand dollars per semester.
Next fall, an estimated 49,187, or 45 percent of the 109,415 qualified students, won't get the award, Ms. Hollis said.
Financial aid directors at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University predict they'll be able to hand out 100 to 150 TEXAS grants to new students. In the past, they've each been able to serve between 1,800 and 2,000 freshmen and transfer students.
"We're just not going to have freshmen getting the TEXAS grant next year," said Larry Burt, UT's financial aid director. "It is not a guarantee anymore. There is a responsibility for people in the know to be going out to high schools and warning them."
Next year's estimate is conservative, Ms. Hollis said. The grant amounts are based on average tuition around the state. The higher tuition becomes, the fewer grants the state can award. Universities, just given the power to set tuition rates, are still figuring out next year's increases.
University financial aid directors say they're scrambling to scrounge up more funds to help this year's students in other ways, but state cuts to universities' budgets have made that nearly impossible. A few hundred students have lost out at some schools, while at others the situation is harsher. At the University of North Texas, for example, officials say between 700 and 1,000 students who qualified didn't get a grant.
Reversal of fortune
The current woes are a flip-flop of the problems in 2002, when universities returned $27 million in unused scholarship funds. At the time, too few returning students had qualified and not enough new students had either qualified for or claimed a grant.
"I even paid to put up billboards to encourage kids to apply," said state Sen. Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat. "Now, I feel like I need to go around the state and tell people they need to be as mad as hell."
Mr. Ellis, who helped lead the charge to create the grant, in recent weeks began urging legislators to add money to the program during the special session on redistricting.
Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said there's no time to address the grant's problems because the special session ends Tuesday. Mr. Perry, she noted, has been a strong supporter of the grant. At the governor's urging, the Legislature tripled the money in the program to $300 million per biennium during the 2001 session. A previous cap on family income was lifted, and any student who could show need had a chance at a grant. Last year, universities were urged to spend leftover money on summer students.
This spring, as the state grappled with a $10 billion deficit, the Legislature approved $324 million for the program. That was an increase, but about $188 million less than state higher education officials wanted. A cap on income was restored; students must come from families that can contribute only $8,500 or less to college. That would include families making up to $60,000 or $65,000. This year, summer grants for new students also were eliminated.
"The budget is a very real factor," Ms. Walt said.
State higher education officials estimated in February that 12,500 new students would not be served because of budget cuts, but the reality was worse, Ms. Hollis said.
A lack of money was a part of the reason, but so was a record 44,376 returning students who qualified. That was about 8,000 more than expected, she said.
The program requires that the money goes first to returning students. The law guarantees that students can keep receiving the grant as long as they maintain a 2.5 grade-point average and a certain course load. In the past, only a small percentage could do that.
Changing income cap
Ms. Hollis said one of the many changes in the program's income cap for recipients might have led to better academic success among recipients. The first two years of the program, there was so little money that only students from families with an income of $30,000 or less qualified.
For the following two years, there was no income cap, adding wealthier students who may have been better prepared, Ms. Hollis said.
"The kids could have come from better high schools. They still were needy, but they weren't as needy," she said. "Had everybody known the dire straits that we would face, we may have done it differently."
Now Texas faces the same problem as several other states. It must reel back a scholarship program that politicians touted to low- and middle-income families.
Don Brown, the Texas Higher Education Commissioner, said he worries that people will think the state reneged on a promise.
"Even though the Legislature was careful not to spell out that it was a promise, a lot of people around the state were taking it that way," Dr. Brown said.
He said if legislators agree, the coordinating board may reduce the amount of each grant next year so more students can be served. Otherwise, little can be done until the next legislative session, he said.
In recent weeks, the coordinating board changed the wording about the TEXAS Grant on its Web site about college, www.collegefor texans.com. It now alerts applicants that they might not get the award even if they qualify.
By December, the board will send letters to high school counselors suggesting a new message for graduating high school seniors.
"What they need to do is say, 'Finish the recommended curriculum for the sake of finishing the recommended curriculum because it helps you in your life, but don't count on the TEXAS Grant,' " Ms. Hollis said.
That doesn't help Thomas Bingham, a 17-year-old freshman at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. He qualified for the grant, but two weeks before he started college, the university's financial aid director told him the school didn't have enough money to give him the award.
Now, he's working two part-time jobs to make up for the lost grant.
"I pretty much went through high school with the state saying, 'You do this, you reach these standards, and we'll help you get to college to get a higher education,' " Mr. Bingham said.
Ms. Walt said the economy isn't the only reason the program is struggling to help every qualified student. More students are qualifying because the state deemed the college preparatory track the default curriculum for all students. That goes into effect with ninth-graders in the 2004-05 school year, but many schools began requiring the change earlier.
Enrollment setbacks
University officials say the grant shortage hurts the very students that must be helped to meet the goals of Closing the Gaps, a state effort to get 500,000 more Texans into college by 2015.
About 60 percent of the TEXAS Grant recipients are black and Hispanic students, the most underrepresented group in higher education in Texas. Closing the Gaps focuses most on Hispanics, the fastest-growing population of college-aged students.
One of the worst grant shortages is at the University of Texas at El Paso, where 72 percent of the students are Hispanic.
At UTEP, about 1,300 freshmen qualified but did not receive the TEXAS Grant this year, said Diana Natalicio, the university's president.
El Paso as a community has been promoting the TEXAS Grant and the need to take college-level courses for years in middle and high schools, Dr. Natalicio said. Most of UTEP's students qualify for financial aid.
"The point here is these are promises broken, and that's very sad," Dr. Natalicio said. "You can't both say that you want to increase the enrollment of Hispanics and others who have been underrepresented in higher education, and at the same time, withdraw the support that you promised."
Nationwide problem
Around the nation, states are cutting back on financial aid programs because of budget cuts, said Brian Fitzgerald, the staff director of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. The group, based in Washington, D.C., advises Congress.
Making things worse, the U.S. Department of Education recently changed its formula for the federal Pell Grants, a move that will disqualify 84,000 students next school year, Dr. Fitzgerald said.
"There's a pattern," he said. "We're lowering tuition, we're increasing aid in good times, and we're cutting appropriations and raising tuition and cutting aid in bad times when people really need it."
States have two choices if they want to preserve scholarship programs: Limit the number of eligible students or lower the rate of tuition increases so the funding doesn't shrink so quickly, said Kenneth E. Redd, of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators in Washington, D.C.
In Texas, there's no immediate remedy, other than urging students to apply for other sources of aid, including loans, Ms. Hollis said.
"It's a sad state of affairs," she said.
— Linda K. Wertheimer
State grant program withers
Dallas Morning News
2003-10-12
http://www.dallasnews.com/localnews/education/stories/101203dnmettxgrant.139aa.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
