Summary of Education Provisions in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

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SCUP Link

As you probably know, there were some postsecondary education related items within the total package of provisions recently passed by the U.S. Senate and House. The American Council on Education (ACE) has published this summary of the pertinent education-related positions: Summary of Education Provisions in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (PDF). Those provisions include: 100 Percent Direct Lending; Pell Grants Changes & Increases; Investment in HBCUs, HSIs, and Tribal Colleges; Community College and Career Training Grant Program; College Access Challenge Grants; Income-Based Repayment; Technical Assistance for Institutions; Perskins Loan Program; State Not-for-Profit Servicing Contracts; and Loan Servicing Jobs in the United States.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• April 5–7, San Diego, CA - "Smart Planning in an Era of Uncertainty"
• April 7, Houston, TX - "Sustaining Higher Education in an Age of Challenge"

Why Aren't There More Poor Students at Rich Colleges?

US News & World Report has new data out on the numbers of poor students at rich colleges. The numbers are remarkably low. At least one analysis finds that well-qualified poor students have "sticker shock" and are unlikely to know how much financial aid they would qualify for at a rich school.

She found that low-income students who are qualified to attend selective schools
(based on their board scores and other measures) have a probability of applying
to such schools of just 8 percent. Once they apply, though, they’re likely to
get in and receive a generous financial aid package — and once they receive
their financial aid packages, they are very likely to enroll. But many such
students may be put off by sticker shock.
“A low-income student who applies
to Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton is not going to pay a dime,” she said,
“but it’s not clear whether that message gets out to them.”

Tying Pell Grants to Inflation to Maintain Purchasing Power?

How Will the Budget Affect Students in Your State, subtitled, "The proposed budget would tie Pell Grants to inflation to maintain purchasing power" is a report from the Center for American Progress. It includes a potentially useful interactive map of the United States. The copy shown here is not interactive.

Struggling College Students are Having an Even More Difficult Time

Are they "doing more with less" or "doing less with less"? This USA Today article examines the longer walks (free, the bus costs money), the changes in diet (less soda, more canned tuna), and other ways students are changing behaviors - and briefly mentioned programs at a number of schools to allow students with unpaid tuition to stay enrolled, and to freeze or limit increases to tuition:

The Community College of Denver has offered a food bank to students for more than 10 years, but in the past year there been a significant increase in its use, says Jerry Mason, director of student life: "We are actually having trouble keeping up." The student government has doubled its annual funding from $3,000 to $6,000 to help with the increased demand, he says.

Federal financial aid applications filed nationwide for this fiscal year increased by 9% compared with last year, a projected 1.2 million more applicants, according to Department of Education data.

Need a College Loan? Ask Your Friends Online.

Somehow, we expect that to some people, using your social networks to get money for college might sound like, well, socialism. Hmm. This article specifically examines GreenNote's business model and use by students, as well as CollegeDegreeFund, CharityforDebt, and GradeFund. We've been using Kiva.org to make microloans in developing countries and this sort of feels the same.

As higher-education costs rise and families feel the squeeze on traditional sources for college funding, students are on the hunt for innovative ways to pay their bills. In addition to loan websites like GreenNote, other sites are cropping up where students can raise donations for college.

Easy money? What's the catch? Some of the gifts come in exchange for earning good grades or for performing nonprofit volunteer work. And so far, the aura of potential on these sites is much greater than the actual money flow. In the near-term, at least, it appears unlikely that enough donors or lenders will come forward to meet even a fraction of the clamor for cash.

In fact, traffic to peer-lending sites may be driven, in part, by a lack of information about resources available to students and parents, financial-aid experts say.

$1.2B in Grants for Non-European Students and Scholars to Engage in Europe

Wow. The European Union has something as a stimulus package for its higher education institutions, who can now use funds from a billion-dollar+ reserve that lets the program, Erasmus Mundus, support non-European students studying in the EU. As well, it will likely assist European students in studying outside of Europe.

In the period 2004-2008, Erasmus Mundus and the Erasmus Mundus External Cooperation Windows offered more than 10,000 scholarships to students and academics from all over the world, with a combined budget of € 609 million. The programme offered the opportunity to third-country students to obtain a degree in Europe, and to academics to share know-how and to contribute to study programmes through teaching or research activities whilst avoiding the brain drain and favouring vulnerable groups. Thanks to these exchanges and through cooperation with non EU partner countries the programme also made a significant contribution to the enhancement of intercultural dialogue and to the sustainable development of higher education in third countries.

The Erasmus Mundus programme (2009-2013) will fully integrate the former 'Erasmus Mundus External Cooperation Windows' and continue to support partnerships between EU and non-EU higher education institutions as a basis for mobility among students and academics.

More Work-Study Student Jobs!

Here in the SCUP office, we find that the 8-12 work-study students we employ each semester are a very useful productivity tool which help to maximize what we can get done with your membership dues. For example, the students are solely responsible for populating and keeping up to date our list of college and university plans, which currently has 734 hyperlinks to strategic and campus plans, and provides Carnegie Classification and other data about each institution for which we have found plans. The last time Congress approved more than a billion dollars in work-study money was 2001. A pot of $200M that is funded by the stimulus package law signed this week could push that total back over $1B in 2009. If it does get spent that way, that creates enough dollars for an additional 130,000 to be funded. More here.

The additional $200-million is intended to help colleges provide more Work-Study jobs for students, but the situation is not quite that simple. Colleges match the Federal Work-Study money on a 25-percent-to-75-percent ratio, so they can take the government funds only if they have the institutional aid dollars to supplement them. Colleges have to pay Work-Study students at least the federal minimum wage, and more if required by state law. The federal minimum wage is scheduled to increase from $6.55 to $7.25 in July. Some of the new money will be absorbed by this increased cost at affected campuses.

And even if a college does offer more Work-Study jobs, it might do so by converting regular on-campus student jobs into Work-Study ones. That would help students with financial need, but it wouldn't mean a net gain in the number of jobs. Even so, that is the route some colleges will take, said Mark L. Lindenmeyer, assistant vice president and director of financial aid at Loyola College in Maryland. After all, many financial-aid offices want to give priority to needy students.