While most Georgetown juniors are busy finding an internship or making plans for their last summer as undergraduates, Kelsey Hendricks (COL ’12), has a much more urgent concern: returning to Georgetown for her senior year.
Hendricks is one of more than 800 Georgetown undergraduates who receive financial aid from the federal government through the Pell Grant program. But funding for next year’s Pell Grants is in danger of being cut by Congress, leaving students like Hendricks unsure of their futures. If the amount of her Pell Grant is reduced, she said, she could be forced to transfer to a more affordable school.
“It’s the difference between having my senior year at Georgetown and having to go back home and find a school nearby that’s not as expensive and get a scholarship,” Hendricks said. “When I came to Georgetown, I never thought this would happen.”
Created by the Higher Education Act of 1965, Pell Grants are annual awards of up to $5,550 given to students from low-income families to help them pay for the cost of attending college. The grants do not require repayment. According to the Student Aid Alliance, a coalition of 62 higher education organizations and universities, including Georgetown, over nine million students across the country rely on Pell Grants to help pay for their secondary education.
Though funding for the program was included in President Obama’s proposed budget, the House of Representatives budget proposal for fiscal year 2012 would bring Pell Grant spending back to 2008 levels, reducing the maximum grant amount from $5,550 to $4,705 and eliminating grants for summer programs entirely. The proposal would also remove funding for Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, a similar program through which students from low-income families can receive up to $4,000 per year.
While the proposed $845 reduction from the maximum awarded Pell Grant might seem like an insignificant part of the $52,443 total cost of tuition, fees, and average room and board at Georgetown, Hendricks says the prospect of coming up with that much extra cash for the next academic year is daunting.
“For a lot of people, I know it seems like nothing,” she said. “But for people receiving the maximum [grant], finding $845 is almost impossible. … Georgetown is staying ‘full-need’ and saying that they’ll cover it, but you never know.”
While Hendricks imagines her worst-case scenario as having to leave Georgetown for a less expensive school, Scott Fleming, associate vice president for federal relations, said Georgetown is committed to meeting the financial aid needs of all of its current students regardless of the outcome of the federal budget debate.
“We’re a need-blind, full-need school,” Fleming said. “[Dean of Student Financial Services] Pat McWade has made clear that certainly with regard to current Georgetown students, we will find a way to make sure that they will be able to continue to go to Georgetown.”
Still, he said that the University’s plan for covering the difference that a cut in Pell Grant funding would create is “still undetermined.”
“It is possible that a student will end up with a package of more loans,” he said.
According to Director of Media Relations Rachel Pugh, though the University provides more than $80 million in scholarships to undergraduate students each year, federal aid is part of the financial aid packages of 40 percent of students. For the 2009-2010 academic year, out of the 5,500 Georgetown students benefiting from some form of financial aid, 830 students received Pell Grant funding totaling $3,478,197, and 467 students received $1,864,197 in SEOGs.
The University is doing what it can to ensure that Congress reapproves funding for the grants. University President John DeGioia wrote a letter to Jacob Lew, director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, stressing the importance of federal aid programs to schools like Georgetown and emphasizing that “maintaining the federal commitment to student aid programs is vital to complementing our institutional aid and meeting our long-standing commitment to covering the ‘full need’ of our students.”
DeGioia also appeared on American University’s radio station, WAMU 88.5 FM, to urge Congress not to cancel funding for Pell Grants and SEOGs, calling the cuts “ill-conceived and harmful to the nation’s economic recovery.”
Fleming says the Office of Federal Relations has been involved with lobbying Congress for the continuation of funding for Pell Grants. Fleming has made the issue his own personal project, and comes off as both deeply passionate and highly knowledgeable about the subject.
“I really care about this,” he said. “This is the number-one priority right now.”
For years, his office has run Student Fed Net, a listserv of over 700 people to which Fleming sends information about federal aid policies. This year, as the budget debate has brought Pell Grant funding into question, the updates have become more frequent.
Because of student privacy rules, Fleming says he isn’t able simply to ask the Office of Admissions for a list of the names of students receiving Pell Grants, so he started the Federal Student Financial Aid Network on the Office of Communications website, which allows students to submit information on how federal aid has impacted them.
Fleming has been personally meeting with staff members of various congresspeople, including Rosa Deloro (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee, to emphasize the importance of aid programs to Georgetown. Using information from the Student Financial Aid Network, he tries to bring a Pell Grant-receiving student from that congressperson’s home state to share their story in person.
“I took a student from Alaska when we went to meet with Senator [Lisa] Murkowski’s staff, just to show her, look, Alaskans get Pell Grants. That’s part of her constituency,” he said. “Quite frankly, a senator from Idaho doesn’t really care what I think, but he probably does care what a student whose parents live in Idaho and vote in Idaho thinks.”
At the core of Fleming’s strategy is an attempt to remind congresspeople of the negative effect a cut in Pell Grant funding would have on individual students’ lives, turning a line on a budget sheet from a numerical abstraction into a human story.
“The most significant thing we can do is put a face on this story,” he said.
Toward that end, his office had three students, Cody Ling (MSB ’11), Jose Vasquez (COL ’11), and Hendricks, record YouTube videos testifying to the importance of federal financial aid in their studies, which he sends to Congresspeople and others with a say in the budget debate.
In the videos, the students describe their background and explain how coming to Georgetown would have been impossible without Pell Grants and SEOGs. Born in Cuba, Vasquez moved to Miami as a child with his single mother, who works as a nursing assistant, and transferred to Georgetown—his “dream school”—after spending two years at Miami-Dade College. He says his Pell Grant provided “the extra difference” that allowed him to come to Georgetown.
Hendricks’s story, Fleming says, is compelling because her background is different than that of the average student who receives federal aid.
Originally from a well-off family in wealthy suburb of Dallas, her situation deteriorated around 2003 when her father became unemployed, her parents divorced, and her mother declared bankruptcy. She found herself living with her grandparents in Louisville, Kentucky, her old life completely shattered.
“My life did a complete 180 in two years. I went from never being told no to never being told yes,” she said. “So when I applied to college it wasn’t where I could get in to, but where I could afford to go.”
When she was accepted to Georgetown, a combination of a Pell Grant, an SEOG, a Stafford Loan (a low-interest, federally subsidized education loan), and a “very generous” scholarship from the University allowed her to attend.
She says she was initially embarrassed about the amount of aid she received.
“When I first came, I didn’t want anyone to know that I had a Georgetown scholarship because most people here don’t have one,” she said. “I felt like I wanted to be put on an equal playing field with people. But now that it seems like it might get taken away, I have to move past that fear of people looking on me with a different light.”
Fleming recruited Hendricks to speak at a breakfast this Thursday morning hosted by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, which will be attended by approximately 20 members of Congress. Fleming hopes they will have her story in mind when they vote on the budget later that day or Friday.
Outside of Fleming’s office, other students are working to dissuade Congress from de-authorizing Pell Grant funds. The Georgetown University Legislative Advocates, a student group which lobbies for legislation that benefits students, submitted a letter to the Senate encouraging them not to cut funding for the grants.
“As a group, we discuss what issues are pertinent to us and we all decided that this was one that we wanted to work on,” Joey Christie (COL ’12) wrote in an email. “We began to learn more about what exactly was going on and drafted a letter that we delivered to the Senate to urge them to provide sufficient funding in the pending Continuing Resolution to maintain the current $5,550 maximum Pell Grant.”
On Friday, the stopgap budget measure passed by Congress in February will expire, leading some to believe that Republicans and Democrats will come to some sort of agreement—and settle the question of Pell Grant and SEOG funding—by then.
“The theory is that Congress will reach some sort of agreement before then,” Fleming said. “This week, we should know.”
There is a possibility that Congress will authorize funding for Pell Grants for this financial year, but not the next. Fleming pointed out that since the colleges have already sent out admissions letters and offered aid packages with federal funds to incoming students for the 2011-2012 academic year, Congress might be hesitant to cut this year’s already-promised funds.
“I actually think at the end of the day, that will be a very powerful argument for this year. Would you like to call [students who have been offered Pell Grants] and tell them, ‘Sorry, just kidding?’” he said. “I’ve been saying, let’s just live to fight another day, live until next year. And I’ll be fighting to save it then, too.”
Even if funds for Pell Grants are cut, Hendricks has been impressed with Georgetown’s efforts on behalf of the program.
“The University has actually been remarkable,” she said. “For the first time in my Georgetown career, I actually feel like the administration cares about students.”
That much is certainly true for Fleming.
“I love what I do, so I’m happy to do it,” he said.
Hendricks seems grateful for the work Fleming and his office have done.
“I’m definitely thankful that they’re actually doing something,” she said. “I don’t come from a wealthy family, but I have a lot to offer, so I want to fight to make sure that I can stay here and live out my senior year at Georgetown.”
While I completely understand the difficulties involved in obtaining $845 in cash for a family or individual on an extremely fixed income and tight budget, the idea that Ms. Hendricks could not afford to take an outside loan of $845 for ONE year in order to graduate from Georgetown is absurd. Students across the country take much, much higher loans each year. She will have a Georgetown degree and if she works after school, paying an additional $845 would not be an issue.
For the record, I do not want a reduction in Pell Grant funding, and I believe it is generally a poor decision on the part of Congress to do that.
Also, Dean McWade and the university are very serious about meeting full-need. The representation of Ms. Hendricks’ situation is completely over-dramatized.
Its not that simple Hoya. If you are already taking out the maximum amount of federal loans, you may not have that money available from anyone. Private loans are not obligated to approve you and a cosigner with good credit is usually necessary. For low income students, this means that they may have nowhere to turn for additional money.
For others the case is more extreme. For someone receiving maximum Pell, SMART and SEOG this could be a loss of up to $8,845. It is not easy to come up with this money, loan or otherwise. Like I pointed out, federal loans are usually already maxed out in financial aid plans given to students and low income students hardly qualify for private loans so many students are going to find it next to impossible to pay for college next year.