College students across the country faced more than $31 billion in unmet financial need for the 2003-2004 school year, according to an analysis by a non-profit organization called Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY.
The organization, which based its findings on a survey performed by the Department of Education, studied the reported financial situations of both dependent and independent students who attended institutions of higher-education. The data pertained to students attending schools both public and private, two-year and four-year, to calculate the amount of unmet financial need.
Tom Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, said Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY has been using data generated by the Department of Education to look at unmet financial need, student workload burden and net price of tuition for families in order to find trends and patterns.
Mortenson said the amount of unmet financial need has been "steadily increasing" in recent years for students whose families fall in the bottom two quartiles of income distribution, while financial aid in the form of federally appropriated Pell Grants has remained unchanged at a maximum value of $4,050, thereby causing the grants' purchasing power to decrease as tuition costs rise.
Since Pell grants and other forms of government financial aid have not kept pace with tuition increases, Mortenson said students must take out more loans or hold jobs while in school in order to make up the amount of tuition and fees not covered by financial aid.
"There's sort of a mindset in Congress that much of the benefit of higher education is private and captured by the student in terms of higher wages," University Education School Dean David Breneman said. "And that has led to a mindset that's said 'Let students pay more of a cost,' and this has been made possible by vastly increasing student loans."
Mortenson said Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY has examined the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, broken down by state and the individual higher education institutions within the states. In Virginia, the research shows that in 2003, 28.7 percent of its students received Pell grants, while only 8.4 percent of students attending the University were recipients, Mortenson said, indicating a very low proportion of students from low-income families.
"When we ranked state flagship universities for percentage of students with Pell grants, U.Va. ranked dead last," said Mortenson.
Breneman said he believes AccessUVa, the University's financial aid initiative, is helping to make the University affordable for students from low-income families while also reaching out to new groups of potential students.
"It isn't just about money -- it is going out there and making it clear to young people that might not even have considered U.Va. that this is an opportunity," Breneman said.
Still, Breneman pointed out that few other institutions will be able to institute plans that can provide such high levels of financial aid, so AccessUVa is a sort of "boutique program," in that it can help a few hundred students to attend the University but will not be able to address the broader problem of unmet financial need on a national level.
"We can't solve the world's problems, but we can try and take care of our own, and we're lucky to be able do so," Breneman said.
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