WASHINGTON – National advocates for simplifying the federal student aid program urged colleagues gathered at a College Board policy forum Thursday to prepare for a long-term campaign for change, telling them not to be dismayed if little of their agenda is in the higher education legislation attached to President Obama’s health care reform bill to be voted on by Congress this week.
“It’s clear we’re going to be a little disappointed, but actually we should be encouraged,” said Dr. Sandy Baum, co-chair of the College Board’s Rethinking Student Aid (RSA) study group, organized in 2005. “If we only think of what’s going to get through Congress this month, this year, then we lose,” Baum warned. “We need to make sure we don’t throw up our hands.”
Scrapping the FAFSA form, as it is now known and disliked, giving the federal funding formula more certainty by linking it to an index, and ensuring aid gets to the neediest of students are among the broad points of the group’s public policy change proposals that had been issued in September 2008.
“Listen to the conversation (today),” Baum told the group, meeting at the Newseum, a few blocks from Capitol Hill in downtown Washington. “It’s really changed from two years ago,” said Baum, referring to the public reception the task force proposals received initially in 2008.
Baum’s comments to some 100 academic leaders from across the country were offered during what was the final RSA task force forum, a series of town-hall-like meetings over the past year that have taken the group and its proposals from the Bay Area of northern California to locations including Las Vegas and Boston. At each stop, task force members have been vetting their recommendations and drumming up grassroots support among students, parents and the academic community.
Likening calls for student aid reform to health care reform, other participants in the forum echoed Baum’s appeal for patience and assertion that progress has been made.
“It’s (the RSA agenda) made its way into the (legislative) conversation and into legislative language,” says Tom Rudin, senior vice president for advocacy, government relations and development at the College Board. “Yes, it’s (this week’s forum) the capstone event but also the next phase of some serious work,” Rudin said.
