One week after the federal government announced it was “immediately” distributing more than $6 billion for colleges to disburse to their students, administrators are wrestling with how to quickly identify the students who need help the most without leaving anyone behind.
The Department of Education announced last week that it was sending out its first batch of money from the coronavirus stimulus law — the Cares Act — enacted last month. By law, those first funds must go to direct aid for students who may have lost jobs, gotten sick, or needed to buy remote-learning technology as a result of the pandemic. (Money that colleges can use for institutional needs will go out later.)
Colleges have wide latitude to decide which students get the cash. In a letter to colleges, Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, wrote that she wanted “to encourage the leadership of each institution to prioritize your students with the greatest need” while trying “to ensure that these funds are distributed as widely as possible.”
Those goals may be hard to meet. Many institutions told The Chronicle that they don’t expect their federal allotment to be enough for the need they’re seeing on their campuses. “The need to ration here is real,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociologist at Temple University who studies college-student poverty.
To learn how college leaders are planning to distribute the funds, The Chronicle contacted the top 10 recipients of coronavirus stimulus money in each of four sectors, as classified by the Department of Education: four-year public universities, two-year public colleges, private nonprofit colleges, and for-profit colleges. The Chronicle identified the top recipients using a data analysis by Ben Miller, vice president for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress.
Among the 13 institutions that responded with substantive answers, two main strategies came up: using a formula to automatically divide the money among students, or requiring that students apply for the funds by explaining their need. A few institutions said they were considering a combination of the two approaches.
Both methods have their flaws, and researchers and advocates for vulnerable students disagreed about which method is most equitable.
The Formula Approach
Colleges that said they planned to automatically calculate each student’s portion would use formulas that depend — sometimes more, sometimes less — on information from students’ federal financial-aid forms. Each said they would use students’ expected family contribution to their educational costs, as listed on the form, in the formulas.
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At the Universidad Ana G. Méndez, a private institution in Puerto Rico with about 32,800 students enrolled in in-person classes, the formula will be simple. Students with an expected family contribution of $0 will get about $800, José F. Méndez, the university’s president, wrote in an email. Everybody else will get about $500. In that way the university’s leaders hope to give an extra boost to their neediest students, while recognizing that all students have been affected.
Dominique Baker, an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University who studies underrepresented students in higher education, said she supports requiring as little work as possible for overtaxed students. She’s wary of relying on an application. Several studies show that the government’s financial-aid forms already don’t capture all needy students.
“Adding 15 extra questions on a form probably isn’t going to help with that,” Baker said. “All that’s actually happened is you’ve made it harder for students to get the money, but it’s still not going to give you the information you need to select who the neediest are.”
She supports erring on the side of giving more students some money — as Ana G. Méndez plans to — even if that means some people who don’t really need the cash will get it. “So that we can make sure that the people who do need it receive it,” she said.
The Application Option
Goldrick-Rab, by contrast, said she is troubled by universities’ reliance on the government’s expected-family-contribution calculations. She cited research by her own organization that finds far more students experience hunger and homelessness than government numbers might suggest. An application process, she said, would provide a better picture of who needs money.
Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said colleges will need to gather at least some information on new needs that may have come up in students’ lives as a result of the coronavirus.
Two institutions told The Chronicle they’re depending entirely on an application. If students don’t fill it out, they won’t get any money.
At Keiser University, a private institution in Florida that until 2011 was a for-profit college, leaders decided to use an application because they believed the federal financial-aid information they had, which students turned in before the coronavirus pandemic, was outdated, Kelli Lane, a university spokeswoman, wrote in an email. The university enrolls about 18,000 undergraduates.
Houston Community College will distribute its Cares Act funds through an online-application process. The application requires no paperwork or documentation: Students simply check off that they exhibited financial hardship as a result of Covid-19 and choose the basic living expenses that they need help paying, including housing, food, and utility bills, said JoEllen Soucier, the college’s executive director of financial aid.
“We need to make that process as streamlined and as easy as possible,” Soucier said. “I feel like we’ve done that with the application.”
For those institutions that choose to use an application, it’s important to ensure everyone knows about it, Baker said. Otherwise the savviest students may deplete the fund before every needy student has a chance to apply.
A Hybrid Model
A few institutions The Chronicle contacted are considering using both financial-aid data and information they’re getting from students now.
“We will most likely use a combination,” Colin D. Riley, a spokesman for Boston University, wrote in an email. Jeff Arthur, vice president for regulatory affairs at the for-profit ECPI University, said his administration had decided to give out seven-eighths of its Cares money via formula and set aside the rest as an emergency pot that students could apply for.
Presidents in the California State University system have struggled with the question of whether they should provide an online application, according to Dianne Harrison, president of the system’s Northridge campus. Her university, which has about 37,000 students, is considering simply asking those who receive financial aid to “opt in” to receive funds, and reserving the online-application process for the small number of students who receive no financial aid but may now be struggling due to the pandemic. The amount of money distributed to a student would be tiered on the basis of how much financial aid the student received since the latter is a good indicator of need, Harrison said.
“We want to strive to make two things happen,” she said. “One is to make it so the most students get as much aid that we can provide, as quickly as possible, and we do it in a way that our staff can actually achieve that kind of efficiency and effectiveness.”
