Boston Globe-Article About Merit Aid

calmom
Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:24:44 +0000

Standrews – I agree with you – the system should have both.

Also – as I said before, the author obviously doesn’t have a clue as to how the need-based system works. Very few colleges provide grant aid to full meet the need of students as determined by the FAFSA. You asked about the “vagaries” of need-based aid. As a single parent, I face year-to-year uncertainty because I never know what my daughter’s noncustodial (and noncontributing) father will earn, or what (or if) he will provide to the CSS-Profile school that insists on that information. There is a very real possibility that my daughter will lose all aid next year because of documentation that her father has not provided. (I was told in no uncertain terms, in a face-to-face meeting with the head of financial aid, that without that info no award would be calculated.) My daughter’s father moved out of our house when she was 7 – essentially, all her school years were spent in a home without her father-- he is under no legal obligation to contribute a dime for his over-18 kid and in fact has not done so – and yet her “need” is determined by factors entirely outside of her control and which are of no benefit to her.

About all I can do is resign myself to the fact that this is a year-by-year thing, and prepare for the possibility that my daughter will not be able to attend college next year because her father is irresponsible. (As I told the financial aid person, there usually is a reason why people get divorced.)

If this were an unusual circumstance, then it would be mere whining on my part. But this is probably more common than not - especially among the neediest students; i.e., those who have grown up in single parent households with moms who were marginally employed, and only able to make ends meet with the child-support that is no longer coming in during the college years. It is also very common that the father earns more than the mother, whose employment options may have been constrained in part by the time demands of childcare responsibilities. So you might have a situation where a mom is earning around $40K, the parents have been divorced 15 years and the dad has remarried, relocated, has a new family and is and earning $200K – but he’s looking at the kid’s 18th birthday as the end of the line for him in terms of financial contribution. Is this kid going to get need based aid? Probably not.

The merit system gives kids like this a chance – the kid might not “qualify” for need-based aid, but at least with hard work and determination the kid can qualify for merit aid.

If the need-based system truly were one that met full need of each and every student, we would have the “socialistic” system that you posit – but we don’t. We have a system where a small handful of colleges will meet full need (as they define it) – and merit largely determines which needy students will have access to those funds, whether or not it is designated as such.

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On another note: this statement by Curmudgeon is technically incorrect: There is no GPA requirement for need awards other than "satisfactory progress toward a degree. My daughter’s need-based award very clearly sets forth a GPA requirement – it is 2.0, obviously not unreasonable – but the point is if the kid fails to complete the requisite number of units per semester, or does poorly enough to warrant academic probation, need-based aid can be lost as well.