On Feb. 21, the Guardian reported on an American Council of Education finding that almost 1.5 million students eligible for financial aid in the form of a Pell Grant fail to apply for it. UCSD Financial Aid Director Vincent De Anda expressed his view that more financial aid outreach programs are needed to solve this growing problem.
Hanna Camp, Associate Opinion Editor: So am I a bad person if my first thought on reading that was, “Yay, more dough for me?”
Marianne Madden, Opinion Editor: Everyone who needs money to be able to attend college should, ideally, receive it. The problem is that the money is out there but it’s not being distributed properly, as this study seems to show, so some disadvantaged students are missing out on college.
H: But the study can’t really tell us why. Do the students know about the Federal Application For Student Aid and just don’t bother to file one? Or is outreach really failing to inform them? Before any more money gets thrown into a program, maybe people should answer that.
M: Those are valid questions that everyone would probably like answered. When I applied to college, I was repeatedly told about the FAFSA, but I’m not sure that goes for students in high schools that have low proportions of students applying to college, subpar college advisors and the like. If potential college-goers don’t know about the FAFSA, that’s a huge problem that a public education campaign can solve.
H: That’s definitely a problem, but presumably what’s already happening is that advisors know about Pell Grants and the FAFSA, and they tell the students that come to them. In low-funded inner-city schools, the student-advisor ratio is so skewed that the information might not get through. But what else can be done? Post flyers?
M: There are a ton of ways to disseminate information to people. TV, radio, signs on buses, as well as flyers, brochures or other written material handed out at high schools might help. Perhaps high school juniors could each be given a small pamphlet explaining the basics of applying to trade schools, community colleges and four-year colleges, with information about financial aid included.
H: On the pamphlets, I think I can agree. About the other stuff, we’d be talking a lot of money being spent without a whole lot of return on the investment. The article said that applications for state financial aid are increasing every year, so we have more and more students asking for help. With state and federal money being so limited, I have to say I’d much prefer the money going to those who apply, which does include a lot of low-income students, than in an ambitious campaign to get even more on board.
M: In my view, if a public education campaign can compel one or two or 10 students nationwide to apply to and attend college who wouldn’t otherwise, it has succeeded. That would justify the investment. But it is also rational to reward those students who took the initiative to apply for a FAFSA with generous financial aid. As is, a lot of federally aided students still have to work nearly full-time in order to continue to afford college. A.S. Council President Christopher Sweeten is one of them.
H: And that all goes back to limited resources. If we had the money to spend on every student, so that they could focus on their studies full-time and not have to work, I think Chris Sweeten would be in a better situation. But it has to be spread pretty thin already. If I were a student in a much worse financial situation than I am, and then saw the state spend a lot of money on commercials and ad campaigns to get more kids to apply for money that’s already tight, I’d be pretty pissed off. The fact is, we don’t necessarily even know why those particular low-income students failed to apply. Why screw with a policy when we don’t yet know if it’s broken?
M: And we see universities like UCSD already struggling to scrape together resources like classroom and dorm space to outfit its existing students. Think of how many more resources America’s universities would need to educate everyone in America.
As I said before, my view is that when students with the potential to go to college don’t, that signifies that something is broken. On one hand, it’s a student’s own downfall if they fail to take advantage of federal aid money that’s available to them. But on the other, someone at some point should step in and throw these students a bone. Access to higher education is huge to me — I don’t think that only relatively privileged kids, who either have the money to go to college or have the government generously aiding them, should attend college. That’s not to say that I support affirmative action, but I support telling students they can and should go to college, and the federal government can make financing it possible.
H: Let’s be fair, though. If the government could aid a low-income black kid instead of me, it would do it. I’m not their highest priority. And that’s OK, but I think there’s a point where the various groups that offer financial aid should recognize that they’ve done a reasonable job putting the information out there, and devote the resources they have left to helping the kids that step up. Distribute pamphlets, by all means. Give advisors up-to-date, accurate information to give to their kids. They don’t even have to memorize it themselves; just hand out a piece of paper. Create a Web site that will come up in even the most inept Google search. But I draw the line at TV commercials and the like. We just can’t assume that the only reason a low-income kid hasn’t applied is because the government didn’t shout loud enough.
M: I’m not assuming anything, but I think a public education campaign is worth a try. And the reason I brought up TV commercials is that everyone — everyone — watches TV, and commercials have a large impact on people, especially adolescents. Have you watched MTV lately? As stupid as that channel is, it has quite a few “public service announcement” sort of things promoting condom use and the like. The fact that they continue airing commercials like those suggests that they have some impact.
But making sure advisors give accurate, up-to-date information is huge. A TV commercial can’t do the work of a face-to-face conversation where an advisor is frank with a kid and says, “Your grades are good, so go to college. The FAFSA can make it possible.” I’ve read accounts of students going to so-called college advisors who tell them to go apply for a job at Wal-Mart so they can survive after high school. That’s ridiculous.
H: Completely ridiculous. I guess my final comment would be that that’s a personnel problem, similar to kids not going into math or science careers because they had a teacher not trained in the subject and who didn’t give a damn. Ad campaigns trying to convince a kid “You too can be a scientist!” wouldn’t work in that situation. It’s not like buying a condom; it’s years of work that not all kids are sure they can handle. I think there’s a much greater role for personal initiative here than we’re allowing. If you want to go to college, you can’t let an advisor’s opinion stop you from doing any more research into it.
M: Sure, sure. But beyond inept advisors, an unacceptably large amount of kids go to badly funded schools, face boring classes taught by inept teachers, come from families where no one went to college. When all their friends work at McDonald’s, it’s an environment where academic achievement is not encouraged, and then smart students face pessimistic, clueless advisors their junior or senior year and have little idea that money is available to them for college, nor any inkling they could and should prepare for higher education and then go. It’s a deep-seated institutional and cultural problem that often starts way back in elementary school. But that’s a much larger discussion than the one we tackled here.
