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News

Increase in Bush's proposal minimal

Additional Pell Grant funding outpaced by rising tuition

By Tina Marie Macias

In an attempt to ease rising college tuition, President George W. Bush has proposed raising Pell Grants by $500 over five years -- but that increase may not help students much, a UH official said.

Executive Director of Scholarships and Financial Aid Robert Sheridan said the $500 increase does not follow the increase in tuition.

"The Pell Grant is not tuition and fees sensitive," he said. "For that to have happened, they would have had to increase it substantially over the past year."

The increase, $100 a year for the next five years, will put the maximum Pell Grant at $4,550 by 2010. That is a 12 percent increase from today's $4,050 maximum.

The proposed increase, however, is less than the $5,100 maximum Pell Grant award Bush promised in 2000. 

"The members of Congress have to make some very hard choices, and those choices have become harder and harder and there are some very expensive things that cannot be cut," Sheridan said. "There have been all kinds of education programs that have been passed in the law but have never found the funding."

A change in the Pell Grant eligibility formula was also proposed in December to help decrease the amount of students who receive the aid. About one-third of college students now receive some aid under the program.

About 89,000 applicants eligible for a Pell Grant under the current formula would lose their award with the new formula, and an additional 1.3 million students will see a Pell Grant reduction of between $100 and $300, the American Council on Education reported.

At UH, 8,710 undergraduate students were awarded more than $23 million in Pell Grants for the 2003-04 academic year, Sheridan told The Daily Cougar in September.

"For the vast majority of our students, there should be no real impact," Sheridan said of the change in the formula.

Pell Grants are offered for the spring in small semesters at a maximum of $4,050 annually. That amount covers 39 percent of tuition at an average public institution. In 1975, when Pell Grants began, they covered 84 percent of tuition, according to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

"The Pell Grant is the largest grant, but what I would suggest to any student is to get their FAFSA completed as fast as possible," Sheridan said. "They should go online and do some of the scholarship search engines."

Bush also announced last month that he wants to encourage high school students to take rigorous course loads by giving students who do so an additional $1,000 on Pell Grants. He also has plans to make Pell Grants available for students year-round.

The program is running a $4 billion deficit, which Congress appropriated $12.8 billion for fiscal year 2005 to fix. That was an $823.3 million increase over the previous year.
 

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