Aim First, Then Fire

John Edwards’ recently announced college plan gets it right on one of the big college affordability issues: the need for a simpler, straightforward financial aid application, and more support to students and their families when they are applying to college and figuring out how to afford it. Unfortunately, his tuition plan—which promises to pay the first year of college for 2 million students—doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Yes, a more generous and simplified grant program targeted to low-income students is needed in our federal financial aid system (although it isn’t clear if Edwards’ plan is targeted to low-income students). Experience shows that when students know that they can afford college, they are more likely to see college as an attainable goal, and therefore more likely to apply and enroll. Edwards’ plan, while it gives students that assurance their first year, does not give them any help in the years after that. Rather than offer this grant program for only one year to “any student who is willing to work hard and stay out of trouble,” I’d like to see the program targeted to students who need it most and offer them grant aid for their entire undergraduate careers.

It also contains vague, merit-based language – they have to take a ‘college prep’ curriculum and ‘stay out of trouble’. Experience with other grant programs with a merit component, like Georgia’s HOPE scholarship program, shows that the students who end up losing the money because of these criteria are generally the neediest students. They don’t always have the strong support systems needed to make sure they take all the required college prep classes and, be honest, would you have wanted your college financial aid dependent on ‘staying out of trouble’?

I worry that this program would end up leaving out the students who need the most help, and inadvertently shift grant aid to students who tend to receive more in other forms of financial aid, like tax credits, loans, and merit-based institutional aid.