Washington — A college access organization called for a “thorough overhaul” of the federal student aid system Wednesday with a new paper that recommends a series of reforms that would steer more resources toward students with the greatest need.
An overarching objective of the reforms is to help more students actually complete college, not just get into college, said Kim Cook, executive director of the National College Access Network, or NCAN, which released a paper titled “Increasing Return on Investment from Federal Student Aid.”
“The student aid system serving our students, especially first-generation and low-income students, is designed to provide access but it has been challenging to achieve higher completion at high enough rates,” Cook said, citing what she described as a “disappointingly low” statistic of 54 percent of students who begin a four-year college program finishing within six years.
To help turn things around, the paper released by NCAN during an event Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center makes a series of recommendations that range from further simplification of the FASFA to redirecting tax credits to the Pell Grant program, which faces a $6 billion deficit in the 2014-15 school year, according to the paper.
The paper says low-income students are being “shortchanged” under the current structure that in 2010 allowed 23 percent of savings from tax credits to go to households with incomes between $100,000 and $180,000, and 60 percent of tuition tax deduction benefits to go to households where the income is between $100,000 and $160,000.
“A portion of these tax benefits should be reallocated to cover the shortfall in the Pell Grant program by adjusting the income limits to $50,000 for single filers and $100,000 for married filers, which more closely targets low- and middle-income students,” the paper states.
The paper concedes that Congress could face “logistical complications” in seeking such a change. However, the paper maintains that: “Even though tax benefits and federal student aid are administered by different agencies and authorized by separate congressional committees, supporting tax-payer subsidies for more affluent families while cutting Pell Grants and other benefits for low-income students is inefficient at best and morally questionable at worst.”
