American Student Assistance 2006 Symposium Your Financial Aid Wishlist
This year saw ASA’s most successful symposium ever. The event, coinciding with ASA’s 50th Anniversary, was hosted in Boston and drew a record crowd of 375 attendees. Financial aid professionals from the world over gathered for the two-day event. This year’s theme: Insights: A Conversation on Student Debt, looked squarely at how debt is impacting the college and career choices of today’s students.
Roundtable Discussions
One of the things that sets ASA’s symposium apart from other conference events is the opportunity attendees have to take part in roundtable discussions on important issues facing the higher education financing industry today. This year our roundtables focused on:
- – Direct to Consumer Marketing
- – The Price Tag of Higher Education
- – Counseling Graduate and Professional Students and Families on Debt
- – Your Financial Aid Wishlist
Your Financial Wishlist
Below are the proceedings of the roundtable discussion on participants’ financial aid wish list from the ASA 2006 Annual Symposium.
Moderator:
Why do you think that merit scholarships are more than adequately funded, but need-based aid still lacks sufficient funding?
Respondents:
Currently students who have not done as well as others because of a lack of opportunities and resources in secondary education are at a distinct disadvantage.
Some institutions are not encouraging funding for general institutional need-based funding that isn’t tied to a particular discipline. All students are not being treated equally in some institutions. Conclusion: it’s time to revisit the imbalance between merit and need-based funds that penalizes students with the least access to higher education.
To institutions, offering merit aid is cheaper than offering need-based aid—how does the public purpose of institutions to offer access to higher education offset a more advantageous financial model for universities?
Moderator:
When do you start communicating with prospective students on personal financial management issues? In high school and middle school? And does this work with students? How useful are special initiatives like College Bowl Sunday in reaching students and parents?
Respondents:
These initiatives are more successful in some states, like Alaska, less so in other states.
The state agencies need to be more proactive in doing early awareness outreach. They must involve parents early as well to impel them to begin planning for their children’s education.
Moderator:
Should we go the route of requiring personal financial education in secondary school curricula?
Respondents:
These programs can be incredibly successful (e.g., ASA’s outreach program at the Worcester, MA-area high schools) but also incredibly expensive. Secondary school systems need to become interested in this as a public policy priority, because they don’t seem to do this yet.
Suggestions:
Make state institutions affordable. States need to get the word out to parents that state institutions are affordable, and that a good education in state schools is attainable. States need to be aware of cultural barriers to attaining higher education and borrowing money to attain an education.
Moderator:
What are some things that would help the state of financial aid today?
Respondents:
- – More staff
- – Take special interests out of education funding
- – More money
- – More options for extraordinary student situations
- – More support in our institutions for the financial aid office
- – Less regulations that are unrelated to access to education but that affect the administration of financial aid
- – Finding more effective ways to communicate with students
- – More institutional resources, more needs-based funding
- – Less merit scholarships, more need-based funding
- – More need-based funding for graduate students
- – More personal financial education at the high-school level to foster early awareness
- – Less forms, simpler PIN’s
- – Make federal agencies work in sync to coordinate student information
- – A more equitable formula for allocating aid geographically
- – Increase compensation for processing Pell grants
- – Cross-campus resources (one-stop shopping) for student financial services
- – More help with dealing with veterans returning to school
- – Integrate Federal Student Aid with other departments impacting financial aid
- – Lower the dependent student age limit from 25
- – Allow students who don’t want need-based aid to opt-out of the FAFSA
- – Revised estimated financial contribution calculation formula to replace the current Need Analysis
- – A tax preparation software module to migrate financial info from tax forms onto the FAFSA
- – A way to easily use existing IRS data to complete the FAFSA
