The “who” and “how” of going to college are changing rapidly, but state financial-aid programs are stuck in the past, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Education Commission of the States.
The report calls on state officials to change their aid programs to focus more on the needs of students rather than institutions and to allow state aid to be used for a greater variety of postsecondary programs.
The commission, which is governed by a bipartisan group of state governors, legislators, and education officials, tracks and analyzes education policy from pre-kindergarten through college.
In 2013 states spent more than $11 billion on financial aid for more than 4.5 million students, the report says, and covered about 16 percent of the price of a four-year public college.
While that’s a “significant” investment, say the report’s authors, the state dollars could be even more helpful without many of the restrictions that accompany the aid.
For example, among the 100 largest state financial-aid programs, the report says, 29 are available only to students who enroll full time, 43 are limited to a set number of academic terms, not accounting for the time it may actually take to complete a degree, and 33 link aid to a standardized-test score or grade-point average.
But the report says that all of those requirements could be hurdles to the growing number of adults who are returning to college to improve their job skills and who are more likely to enroll part time, take longer to complete a program, and need more flexibility in the mode of education (such as online courses and competency-based programs).
“As students increasingly are drawn from populations likely to be older, more diverse, and further removed from secondary completion, it is critical that state financial-aid programs work for this new majority of college students as well,” the report says.
In order to improve state aid programs, policy makers must have clear goals for the purpose of the money and data to follow the outcomes.
And to protect those goals, states should direct the money to individuals, not campuses, the report recommends: “Forfeiting direct oversight means that the state’s investments in financial aid may be overshadowed by institutional priorities.”
The state aid programs should also be more flexible, the report says, allowing students to see what aid they might receive even before they are accepted into postsecondary programs or programs not tied to the traditional academic calendar.
Lastly, the report recommends state aid programs that can be applied to students in nontraditional academic programs, such as competency-based models.
The report also provides examples of state programs already employing some of the practices the commission recommends, and a website (http://statefinancialaidredesign.org/) highlights its proposals. By early summer the commission is scheduled to release a 50-state database of financial-aid policies.
Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.
