Amarillo College and Brown University are very different institutions.
Amarillo, in a city of 200,000 in the Texas panhandle, enrolls more than 10,000 undergraduate students. Two-thirds attend part time, and 40 percent are eligible for Pell Grants. The college’s foundation has $42 million in net assets.
Brown University, in Providence, R.I., is a member of the Ivy League. It enrolls about 7,000 undergraduates, nearly all of whom attend full time, and less than 14 percent are eligible for Pell Grants. Brown also has an endowment of roughly $4 billion.
I have just as much hope in our students’ leading our community forward as I do in Harvard’s.
The two institutions now have one thing in common: Both are receiving about $4.8 million from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (Cares) Act, meant to help students and colleges weather the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Half of that money must be given to students to help them cover unexpected costs resulting from the disruption of their education.
Amarillo and similar institutions, however, must spread that amount over a much larger population of disadvantaged students than do colleges like Brown. (In an emailed statement, a spokesman for the university said it “is home to students from every socioeconomic background, many of whom are facing acute financial hardship, given the impact of the pandemic on their families.”)
The situation is the result of the formula that Congress chose to allocate the more than $12.5 billion that will go specifically to colleges. In the law, Congress specified using the measure of “full-time equivalent” students rather than a simpler head-count figure to allocate the dollars.
At many public and private four-year colleges, a majority of students are studying full time, so those institutions will do well under the formula. But colleges with a high percentage of part-time students, which typically enroll more disadvantaged students, will get far less in emergency aid per student.
Students who work outside of college and have families often can’t afford the time or the expense of attending full time, said Debbie Cochrane, executive vice president of the Institute for College Access and Success. “If you’ve got two half-time community-college students that need a laptop, that’s still two students,” she said.
Russell D. Lowery-Hart, Amarillo’s president, said the way the money was distributed shows that students at such prestigious institutions are considered more important than those at his institution. On Twitter, Lowery-Hart compared Amarillo College’s $4.8 million in emergency aid with the roughly $8.6 million doled out to Harvard University.
“I have just as much hope in our students’ leading our community forward as I do in Harvard’s,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
In other ways, Congress and the Education Department explicitly sought to help colleges that serve low-income students as well as minority-serving institutions. The law, passed in late March, requires that 75 percent of the money be weighted to favor institutions with higher proportions of Pell recipients in the student body, and devotes an extra $1 billion to minority-serving institutions.
When the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, announced the release of the emergency aid for college students, she urged institutions to spend that money on those who need it most. She suggested colleges use the maximum Pell award — nearly $6,200 — as a guide, and encouraged colleges that already have ample resources to share their federal aid with other institutions.
Ben Miller, vice president for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, said using head counts instead of full-time students as the metric to determine allocation would have created a different set of trade-offs, giving $1 billion more to community colleges but taking that money mostly from public four-year colleges. For-profit colleges, too, would have gained $350 million by using head counts, he said.
Another compromise in the bill — to not count students who study exclusively online — also prevented for-profit colleges from getting several hundred million dollars. But even that measure has become a double-edged sword.
John Enamait, president of Stanly Community College, in North Carolina, said his institution had been innovating for several years by moving programs online. More than 60 percent of the college’s 2,500 students are now enrolled in such programs, which made it easy for them to transition when the campus was shut down. But it also meant that the institution got no federal emergency aid for those students.
Lowery-Hart, at Amarillo, said his college is now thinking about how to stretch its limited dollars into the fall, and even into next spring if the pandemic’s fallout continues that long.
Social workers on campus are working to get public support for students, signing them up for unemployment benefits and food stamps if they qualify. The college also had $250,000 of its own money to help students through emergencies, Lowery-Hart said, but it has already spent a fifth of that amount.
Community-college leaders say they understand the difficulty of coming up with a fair formula. But they also note that their institutions are the ones that trained many of the first responders who are dealing daily with the pandemic, as well as many of the newly unemployed.
“We have to recognize that the way it was distributed leaves many of our students in a bind,” said Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California Community Colleges system, which serves more than two million students at 115 institutions. “Many have now lost their jobs because of the shutdown,” he said, “and now they get less resources from the stimulus.”
