| A Shaky Season for Student Loans
Shortly after New Year's Day, Pat Watkins, financial aid director at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., placed a worried call to National Education, a student loan company she has been working with for nearly two decades. She had heard rumors that the company was no longer funding federal Stafford and PLUS (Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students) education loans, but had received no official word from the company. She found out that the phone of National Education's local rep had been disconnected. Later she learned that Chicago-based National Education was not planning to accept applications for new loans for the spring semester after Jan. 15, though they planned to fund disbursements for students who received loans for the fall. Federal Loans Lose Funders That was the first surprise.
Contractor loses La. scholarship account data dating back to 1998
BATON ROUGE, La. -- A Boston-based contractor hired to store and safeguard state scholarship and college savings account data lost most of those records _ including bank account numbers and student and parent Social Security numbers _ during a move, officials say. "We certainly don't want to create any panic. But people should be aware and take the necessary steps," said Melanie Amrhein, executive director of the Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance. "This is backup data off of a mainframe that contains sensitive personal information." Special equipment and software and "sophisticated computer skills" would be needed to get the compressed records from the TOPS scholarship program, START Saving Program, and Free Application for Federal Student Aid, according to a notice posted on the Internet.
Parents often fumble on financial aid forms
High school seniors have been scrambling for months to complete their applications for college. Now it's their parents' turn to sweat.
The start of the year marks the launch of financial aid season, when parents fill out exhaustively detailed forms in an effort to get their share of the billions of dollars of assistance available. Unfortunately, aid forms can be every bit as unnerving as college applications. Missteps can cost thousands.
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After Harvard, Yale boosts aid
Yale announced this week that it will change its undergraduate financial aid policy for all students this fall. The changes are meant to make college more affordable for middle and upper-income families and follow in the footsteps of a similar policy enacted by Harvard last December.
"We want all of our students to make the most of Yale academically and beyond without worrying about excessive work hours or debt," Yale president Richard Levin said in a press release. "Our new financial aid package makes this aspiration a reality."
At both Yale and Harvard, parents with annual incomes below $60,000 a year will not have to contribute toward their child's college education, and families with incomes from $60,000 to $120,000 will now pay between 1 and 10 percent of their incomes toward tuition.
Colleges uneasy about Harvard's deal on tuition
Two words to students hoping to get a break on college tuition now that Harvard and a handful of rivals have increased financial aid to middle-class students: Fat chance. Most colleges say they aren't loosening the purse strings just yet, although as financial-aid season approaches they are under intense pressure from parents to offer Harvard-style deals. Ursinus College's enrollment director, Richard DiFeliciantonio, said a parent already had called him to ask: "'If Harvard can do this for their kids, why can't you?' " The answer is obvious: Ursinus, like most colleges, isn't as filthy rich as Harvard, whose endowment of $35 billion is the largest in the nation. "Maybe 30 colleges in the country can even think about doing what Harvard is doing," said DiFeliciantonio, whose school has $150 million in its coffers.
Loan Scandal Escalates
When Andrew M. Cuomo started asking questions about the relationships between lenders and colleges, many in higher education scoffed (off the record) that this was a case of an ambitious politician looking for headlines and that there wasn’t much for his inquiry to find. There’s no doubt that Cuomo, New York State’s new attorney general, is an ambitious politician looking for headlines, but he’s finding more and more to investigate. And some experts on aid are increasingly worried that the scandal is going to scare some students and families away from borrowing or from getting advice from financial aid offices. .
UT Holds Public Forums On Tuition Hike
As the University of Texas considers raising tuition once again, education leaders from around the state are meeting to talk solutions for higher education. Those meetings are happening at the Frank Erwin Center to help increase college enrollment around the state significantly. The goal is to increase enrollment across the state by 30 percent from 2005 to 2010. While it is an achievable goal, still, university systems across the state feel they have to increase tuition to stay competitive, so while more students want to go to college, making it affordable is another challenge. Financial challenges, like getting students to apply through Free Application for Federal Student Aid, is just one of the many roadblocks to work through.
Text of Napolitano address
There was no plan to give Arizona's children the early start they need and deserve. Teacher pay was lagging, and we weren't doing what was necessary to support our new teachers and keep our best educators in the classroom. Phoenix was the largest city in the nation without a university-based medical school and our state was not graduating enough students with college degrees to keep up with our growth.Fast-forward to today. We've created a new grade level by making full-day kindergarten available to every Arizona family. We've made historic investments in early childhood education and in teacher pay. We've broken ground on an all-new medical campus, tripled our contribution to student financial aid, and built up our universities.This is progress, and it is precisely where we needed to go.Now, we must move quickly this year to implement the voter-approved initiative aimed at early childhood.
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