With the cost of college rising every year and more and more students drowning in student loan debt, colleges are looking into more ways to offer financial aid to students. And this time, they are looking to focus on groups of students that don’t fall into the typical categories of scholarships and grants.
Most financial aid is either need-based — doled out to kids who come from poor families — or talent-based — for students with perfect 4.0 GPAs or athletic skills. This leaves students who fall somewhere in the middle out in the cold.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that it is these “middle students” and their parents who have had to take on the most debt to actually attend college. About 20 percent of students whose families earned more than $65,000 accumulated $30,000 or more in student loans by graduation, according to the most recent College Board analysis.
Now state programs and even schools themselves are stepping up to try and close the gap.
California started a scholarship program this year that allows students whose families earn as much as $150,000 a year to apply, WSJ reported. Pennsylvania rolled out the Ready to Succeed Scholarship, which offers as much as $2,000 in aid for residents whose families earn up to $110,000. Minnesota added money to its state grant program last year to provide up to $5,000 for students whose families earn between $60,000 and $120,000.
“Someone who would have been viewed as able to pay a decade ago without taking on too much debt, now those families are taking on too much debt and we need to try to help,” said Larry Pogemiller, commissioner of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education.
Individual schools like Washington and Lee University, Lawrence University and Vincennes University have upped their aid offerings to this group as well. are beefing up their aid offerings to students who fall into that middle zone as well.
Wall Street Journal reports that it was private universities with big endowments like Harvard University that helped usher in this new trend. Harvard increased its grants for students whose families earned between $65,000 and $150,000 and had assets to match such earnings, said costs wouldn’t top 10 percent of their income about six years ago.
“This very large segment of the population was being squeezed out,” Bill Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, told WSJ. “At $180,000, you can be broke when it comes to paying for college.”
