Student Aid

Since its enactment four decades ago, Pell Grants have helped needy students go to college, but in many ways, the program has veered from its original intentions. Arthur M. Hauptman, a higher education consultant, writes in a recent Inside Higher Ed essay that the program needs to change.

“Instead of disadvantaged students and their families knowing years in advance of their eligibility for aid, the process of applying for and receiving a Pell Grant (and federal student aid more generally) is excessively complicated and often serves as a barrier to access,” he writes.

Rather than modify the program, which has hundreds of pages of rules on the books, Hauptman suggests starting over, with an adjustment in principles for a new era. He says it includes a “radical simplification” of the application and better targeting of benefits for the neediest students.

Among his recommendations:

1. Eliminate the FAFSA and replace it with federal income tax submissions as a way to calculate federal aid eligibility.
   
   
2. Eligibility for Pell Grants would be based on the 1040A income tax provisions. These tax-based amounts could be translated into categories of eligibility rather than precise dollar amounts.
   
   
3. Eligibility for Pell Grants would be more restricted than it is now. Family income of students qualifying for Pell Grants would be limited to a percentage of national median income or some other indicator of family financial ability. Also, eligibility for the program would be limited to students enrolled half time or more.
   
   
4. For any given student, as family income increases, eligibility for tax credits should increase up to the maximum credit as Pell Grant eligibility recedes.
   
   
5. The formula for distributing campus-based student aid funds to institutions and LEAP funds to states should be changed so that in the future any appropriated funds would be distributed on the basis of the number of Pell Grant recipients who graduated in the previous year from that institution or institutions within a state.
   
   
6. Eligibility for in-school interest subsidies in the federal student loan programs in the future would be limited to Pell Grant recipients.

Inside Higher Ed, January 2012

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