Despite the University of Alaska’s budget crisis, classes for the fall semester are to go on as scheduled, according to leaders of the university system. The spring could be a different story. That’s when program cuts may start taking effect.
But there’s a more immediate problem. Thousands of students rely on state scholarship money that currently isn’t available. With classes starting next month, many students are scrambling. Some have already decided to transfer, while others are looking into it.
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Despite the University of Alaska’s budget crisis, classes for the fall semester are to go on as scheduled, according to leaders of the university system. The spring could be a different story. That’s when program cuts may start taking effect.
But there’s a more immediate problem. Thousands of students rely on state scholarship money that currently isn’t available. With classes starting next month, many students are scrambling. Some have already decided to transfer, while others are looking into it.
“Everybody is panicking,” said Joey Sweet, a master’s student on the Anchorage campus who recently served as the student regent on the university’s board.
The Alaska Performance Scholarship and the Alaska Education Grant, the largest financial-aid programs in the state, have become victims of political chaos as lawmakers and the governor clash over the state’s finances. About 12,000 students were sent emails this month telling them that their scholarships might not be funded.
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James R. Johnsen, the university system’s president, told students last week: “Hang on.” Johnsen said lawmakers had indicated to him that they want to restore the financial aid. But many students have described their grim circumstances on social media in recent days: If I don’t have my scholarship, I can’t enroll this semester.
The annual cost of tuition and fees at the three universities in the system ranges from $6,700 on the Fairbanks campus to $8,600 on the Anchorage campus for full-time, in-state, undergraduates. Many University of Alaska students attend part time and pay by the credit hour.
The scholarships and grants weren’t part of the $130-million cut for the university system made by Gov. Michael J. Dunleavy. How exactly the financial aid disappeared is complicated, but it has to do with a process called “sweeping.”
On the last day of each fiscal year, per an Alaska constitutional mandate, money from dozens of the state’s budget accounts is “swept” into a savings account — the Constitutional Budget Reserve — that’s difficult to pull from. (In the past, the scholarship funding wasn’t subject to the process, but that changed this year.)
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As long as lawmakers vote by a three-quarters majority to authorize a “reverse sweep” before the end of the fiscal year, the money from those accounts that’s supposed to fund state programs ends up in the right place. But this year the Legislature has been embroiled in a bitter standoff over the state budget, and the “reverse sweep” vote failed.
So Dunleavy, a Republican, “swept” the money to pay for college scholarships and grants into that hard-to-access savings account. On Friday, Dunleavy’s office released a list of the accounts that had been affected, which also includes a large endowment that helps poor rural residents pay their expensive power costs. Lawmakers have some time to muster the votes for a “reverse sweep,” but not much.
Mallory Bradford has already made her decision: She’s not going back to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks this fall. Her state financial aid — from both the Alaska Performance Scholarship and the Alaska Education Grant — had covered the roughly $4,000 tuition cost per semester for the past two years.
Bradford had already been leaning strongly toward transferring. As she watched the budget mess play out in recent months, she worried that many of the things she had enjoyed doing as a student would disappear. For one, she played on the Fairbanks volleyball team, and she wondered whether the team would even have a future after the cuts.
She was also active in campus efforts to stop alcohol and drug abuse. “We had made goals for the student population that we had,” she said. Now that Fairbanks could have a much smaller student body, she said, “it’s just like, What’s the point?”
When she got the letter saying her scholarships weren’t funded, she said, “it really just made the final decision for me.”
Bradford plans to stay in Alaska until early next year. Then she’ll start the process of transferring to a college on the East Coast. She’ll have to take out loans at her new institution, but she’s ready to leave Alaska, so she believes it will be worth it.
Claire Childs, meanwhile, isn’t going to have the freshman year she’d hoped for. She had planned to attend the University of Alaska at Anchorage and live on campus. But she’d been banking on a handful of state scholarships. Now she’s not confident they’ll come through. “It’s honestly devastating,” she said.
Childs thought about living at home and commuting to Anchorage for class, more than 50 miles each way, so she wouldn’t have to pay for room and board. But the transportation costs and inconvenience nixed that option.
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So Childs plans to spend the next two years taking classes at Mat-Su College, the regional campus that’s closest to home. Given the budget crisis, she’s leaning toward transferring out of state after that. She plans to return to Alaska eventually and hopes to work in homeopathic medicine, helping promote natural remedies to opioid addiction.
Childs is relieved that she’ll still receive one important piece of financial aid. Initially, she’d been told that the scholarship she’d been awarded from the Alaska State Fair was in jeopardy. “That letter scared the crap out of me,” she said.
Then, a couple of days ago, her mom got a clarifying email: The state-fair money was safe.
Jessica Reisinger, a junior on the Anchorage campus, is in a better place. She has received the Alaska Performance Scholarship for the past two years, but she has other scholarships that aren’t funded by the state. She’ll be OK for this fall, no matter what.
But Reisinger, who’s studying chemistry, has no idea what to expect in the spring, once program cuts start to materialize. She loves her university and wants to stay. She knows officials have to come up with teach-out plans for students whose programs are eliminated. At the same time, she’s seen all the chatter about students transferring on social media, and she can’t help but think: Should I consider transferring?
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At this point, Reisinger feels as if she has to keep her options open. She’s looking at colleges elsewhere that are still accepting applications. “I don’t want to just not do anything, and, if things really go badly this fall semester, to not have options,” she said.
What’s especially tough for students is that they have planned for years to get the Alaska Performance Scholarship, said Alex Jorgensen, a senior on the Anchorage campus and president of the student government there. In high school, students have to take certain classes, maintain a certain grade-point average, and earn high scores on standardized tests to ensure that they qualify.
Meanwhile, faculty members are grappling with the question of what to tell their students.
Kathryn Milligan-Myhre, an assistant professor of biology on the Anchorage campus, returned to Alaska in 2015, after doing her Ph.D. and postdoc work in the lower 48 states. She’s Alaska Native, and she wanted to be a role model for Alaska Native students. She wanted to give them the opportunity to do academic research.
Now Milligan-Myhre is wondering: Am I going to have a job? How many classes will I have to teach? Is that going to affect my research and my lab? Is my university even going to have a research program?
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“My students come to me all the time and ask, What’s the future of Alaska?” she said. “And I honestly don’t know what to tell them anymore.”
Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.