Daily Aid 64: Social security benefits and the FAFSA, UC and online degrees

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Daily Aid 64: Social security benefits and the FAFSA, UC and online degrees

13 January 2009 1 views No Comment

Daily Aid 64: Social security benefits and the FAFSA, UC and online degrees

Student Financial Aid News

“In response to the flagging economy and declining state support, University of California regents this week will consider reducing freshmen enrollment and freezing the pay of nearly 300 top administrators,” the Union-Tribune reports. “UC President Mark Yudof has scheduled a special meeting on Wednesday to ask the regents to scale back freshmen admissions by 2,300 for the coming school year. The move would represent a 6 percent rollback to 35,300 new freshmen from around 37,600 admitted in the current year. The reductions would be limited to six UC campuses – San Diego, Davis, Irvine, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz.”

Commentary

The only surprise here is how long it took before the state of California had to do something about cutting in the UC/CSU system. The system itself is a great system that serves many students very well, but the reality is that the state of California is broke, and no matter what priority higher education is, if you have no money, you can’t invest in education.

Expect other seriously cash-strapped states to look at similar measures. A college education is now out of reach for 6% more Californians in the UC system, simply because there’s no money for it. I’d expect scholarships and state aid to go down with the ship as well.

In the short term, this is terrible for students. In the long term, this and other moves might be the harsh, unpleasant, bitter medicine that higher education needs in order to seriously evaluate what the value of higher education is. Our delivery system for education is still based on a model developed during the Great Depression, when Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Mellon essentially paid to turn the education system into a human factory system for producing good workers in their factories. 80 years later, we’re still struggling to understand how education needs to change for the 21st century.

Colleges, especially state systems, need to plow some resources into online degrees and online education – as a system, online education scales much better than brick and mortar education. Adding “seats” to a virtual classroom is a question of server space and faculty, not physical plant (buildings). No dorms to build, no cafeterias to maintain, no lawns to carefully mow, no expensive athletic teams to subsidize – the online education world delivers only the education you’re paying for.

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Mail Bag

Jim tweets:

Chris, any sources for funding grad school at 40 years old? I’m thinking that most scholarships are aimed at young’uns not midlife changers.

Jim, it turns out there’s a lot of financial aid available for returning students. Take a look at this great directory assembled by Michigan State University.

Geek Girl Camp tweets:

Any scholarships for women in transition?Anything we can do for @GeekGirlCamp?Our prime MO is to raise $ for scholarships for women.

Absolutely, yes. Again, Michigan State has a great directory for women’s scholarships as well. If by transition you mean homeless transitioning, you’ll want to have your constituents take a hard look at the 2009-2010 FAFSA and the new homeless qualifications. There’s a series of questions that deal with homelessness that can improve financial aid eligibility.

Beata writes back in:

I have another question: Since my father passed away I’ve been getting money from Social Security (I think it’s called survivor’s benefits?) every month (though, it will stop next month when they consider me 18).

Am I supposed to report this anywhere on the FAFSA? How about the PROFILE?

Actually, you’re not supposed to. Untaxed Social Security income is specifically excluded from the untaxed/unearned income questions on the FAFSA – on the 2009-2010 FAFSA, this is question 47, part i. Do NOT include SSI or survivors benefits in your FAFSA. Not sure about the CSS PROFILE, but for sure it’s not supposed to count against you on the FAFSA.

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