Good Xmas and tsunami timing to leave some students behind, positioning USA on the PISA test results..
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Pell Grant overhaul halts aid to 80,000
By Dan Morgan, Washington Post | December 24, 2004
WASHINGTON -- The Department of Education yesterday announced a new formula for calculating eligibility for college financial aid, a move that will eliminate federal Pell Grant scholarships for an estimated 80,000 to 90,000 low-income students and force a modest scaling back of other types of state and federal assistance to broader categories of undergraduates.
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Bush administration officials said the new formula -- which is used to measure a family's ability to pay college costs -- will save the government at least $300 million in the 2005-2006 academic year. The neediest students, who receive the maximum federal scholarship of $4,050, will be unaffected and only a small fraction of the 5.3 million Pell recipients will lose their grants entirely, officials said.
The previous formula was a decade old and relied on 1990 data that is widely acknowledged to be out of date. The new formula uses tax data from 2002.
Congress, however, had resisted the change in a series of bills approved by both houses over the last 18 months, and education officials indicated yesterday that they were taken aback by the timing of the announcement, just two days before Christmas.
Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said he was 'very unhappy" and promised to renew the battle for broader Pell Grant funding next year. Senator Jon Corzine, a Democrat from New Jersey, said he was 'outraged that the Bush administration is going forward with these punitive cuts," adding that the change in the eligibility rules was 'nothing more than a backdoor effort to cut student aid funding."
'For those working to get ahead, this is a scene from 'The Grinch who stole my education,' " he said.
The Chronicle of Higher Education called the move the 'December Surprise," and Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, representing 2,000 colleges and universities, said the timing was 'unfortunate and probably deliberate."
Because many states use the federal formula to calculate aid to students at state universities, the changes announced yesterday will have a ripple effect, education officials said.
Eligibility for subsidized federal student loans could also be affected. But nonsubsidized loans, which are not tied to a family's income, would not be impacted.
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