Limiting Cal Grants will only cost the state and the UC more money

Lucas

bensley

While it might seem that GPAs are an obvious part of academic life, for some students, their GPA might soon carry significant financial weight.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s higher education plan in a proposed budget for next year would increase the GPA requirement for Cal Grant aid applicants and would reduce the amount of aid available to students in an attempt to lower education-spending in the state.

Brown’s proposal would increase the GPA requirement for tuition aid from 3.0 to 3.25, while increasing that of transfer students from 2.4 to 2.75. These cuts, however, would only serve to encourage students to pad their GPAs rather than prepare for college at a more meaningful level, and they would also reduce access to and the quantity of financial aid for students in public and private universities.

Brown’s plan makes a clear distinction, however, between the private and public. Financial aid contributions to students enrolled in California’s public higher education institutions would not be as heavily affected as those to students in private institutions. As students at private universities see reductions in their financial support, some might be inclined to transfer to a public institution, in turn prompting increased state expenditure for public financial aid.

While the changes seem to encourage students to perform better in high school, the effort to save costs by hiking GPA requirements could drive students to favor non-college preparatory classes that they could perform well in, according to a report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, a nonpartisan adviser in fiscal policy.

Higher GPA requirements would also apply to students currently attending a UC and would necessitate additional aid from the UC system itself.

“If a student at a UC loses their eligibility (for Cal Grants) then we compensate them with a UC grant and increase the amount that students must work and the amount we expect them to earn,” said Nancy Coolidge, coordinator of government relations in student financial support for the UC Office of the President.

Any change in the pool of grant money is bound to affect students dependent on them, Coolidge added.

Increasing requirements for Cal Grants among UC students alone, while making some ineligible for Cal Grants and dependent on UC-generated grants as a result, is only half the problem. Brown’s proposals also encourage disproportionate cuts of grant amounts available to students attending private universities.

“(The proposal) was to reduce the maximum Cal Grant amount from $9,708 to about $5,720 to cut spending for students going to private schools,” said Judy Heiman, an adviser for higher education in the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

In comparison, the maximum amount of Cal Grant aid available to UC students would decrease from $12,192 to $6,827.

These relatively larger subsidies for public universities may partially explain why sources of financial aid are more easily found at UC campuses than at private universities.

“The UC taps into all available funding sources, (including) federal, state, UC and private donations of grant support to provide enough to low-income students to make attendance at UC a realistic possibility,” said UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein.

Although grant programs for the UC system continue to be subsidized by the state and by private sources, private universities may have fewer avenues through which to mitigate the high costs of students’ grants. As a result, private university students dependent on Cal Grant aid to help cover their higher, less-subsidized tuition may well be pushed to transfer to and attend public universities and thereby generate additional costs for educating these students and providing them with public grants.

In the end, our state government should realize that disproportionate cuts to financial aid for private universities will only increase the burden of state institutions to provide for students attending public schools. Discouraging private university students from attending their schools with disproportionate grants of aid while hiking GPA requirements will only encourage more students to enroll in public schools, and that means higher costs for public education.

Email Bensley at

[email protected]. Send general comments to

[email protected] or tweet us @DBOpinion.