A new report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association suggests that new eligibility will be granted for the for the Pell Grant which will help over 200,000 college students across America.
The Pell Grant is a form of financial aid that greatly helps low-income students pay their college tuition.
This report comes after there was much regard for the change of the system for the Free Application of Federal Student Aid or FASFA. It should make it easier for people to gain status and be granted these programs in order to help them pay their tuition. The amount of Pell Grant eligible students is expected to increase greatly, and in turn, an additional $617 million dollars in grants is expected to help them. The new FASFA is expected to make it much easier for students to receive aid, as they will have to answer fewer questions to be eligible and more aid will be available for them. According to reports, students are expected to receive a 25 percent increase in the spending level, which will not only open more opportunities for students in need but give them more of their tuition paid off.
The one issue with these new changes to the FASFA system is experts say it could impact out-of-pocket payments to other students and increase them slightly. Determining eligibility for these grants such as the Pell could also be more difficult, as objects such as net worths of small family businesses and farms, and those students could lose eligibility based on how much these businesses make.
Frank Ballman, director of federal relations of the National of State Student Grant and Aid Programs said in a statment, “In some cases, they might be students from well-to-do families, and that’s not terrible, but there are several cases where a family might have to choose which child gets to go to college … It’s already challenging enough as a rural student to find the place to go to college, because lots of people live in what we call educational deserts. If this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back regarding rural students being able to go to college, that would be a tragedy.”
This ruling is expected to benefit the more urban students, especially those with low income, and hurt the rural students and institutions, where they might be forced to make hard family decisions.
Overall, they look at the situation as a win in the long run with 174,000 more students expected to be eligible by the time this version of the grant is ready to be approved. At Mercy, most see it as a win, as this new model is implemented it will help many students.
Enrique, a sophomore, said “I would love the extra eligibility and hope I am eligible so I can stop using all my work money to help pay tuition. I think everyone who can’t afford school should be eligible for these grants to add less stress to their life and be able to have less worry while going through their classes.”
The new program is not expected to take over until the 2024-25 school year, but the changes made will have a big impact on the people eligible. The program will have been state-for-state eligible, which means the state will ultimately decide on what students can get and will likely reside on whether the state is a first-dollar or last-dollar program. First-dollar programs give out grants and awards before other costs are calculated, while last-dollar programs are the opposite. Last dollar is far more common in most states, including in New York, but it will be way harder to predict in which way changes will go for them.
