By Peter Galuszka
Helen Dragas gets it.
The Board of Visitors member at the University of Virginia tried to hold the line against cutting back on the school’s AccessUVA program, a highly successful endeavor that for 10 years has helped low income get a high level education with generous grants.
Citing cost pressures, U.Va. President Teresa Sullivan convinced the board to stick to lower income kids. Now they have to take out loans for the first $7,000 of their costs. Only then would they be eligible for grants. This automatically sticks them with $28,000 in debt no matter what they do or how poor they are.
This saves the school about $6 million a year by the time it’s fully implemented in 2018. U.Va. is following other schools such as Yale, MIT and Harvard that had easy grant policies for low income students but rolled them back.
One argument is that U.Va. is already a terrific bargain for in-state families (I know since I have been a Hoo parent). One possibility to help low income kids would be to charge high-income families a little more than the $14,000 or so annual costs. Still a great deal when schools like Wesleyan in Connecticut and Harvey Mudd in California run $57,000 for tuition, room and board.
Some other bloggers around here cheer the decision to screw low income students. That is to be expected given that some of them actually want to privatize U.Va. and make it some hoity-doity Southern-fried Harvard. They just don’t want poor kids around. Their families may make well into the six figures but they think U.Va. is too expensive. Get a life!
It’s also odd that U.Va. has come to this decision just before President Barack Obama announces his plan to restructure giving federal aid according to how many low income students a school has, its graduation rates, etc.
The plan may not go anywhere but it is an effort to do something about college costs. Moreover, U.Va. also could cut more administrative costs. And, how much did that South Lawn project cost, anyway?
