College catalogs in the future will reveal how much textbooks will cost for each course. The seven-page financial aid application form will be simplified into a two-page document. And universities will be required to report their operating costs to the federal government and explain reasons for raising tuition.
It took Congress five years — longer than it takes many undergraduates to earn their degrees — to pass the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which spells out dozens of regulations for the nation’s colleges and universities.
As the federal government irons out details of the law, which President Bush signed in August, schools can expect the wide-ranging measure to make a bold impact on campus life as it touches on areas including veterans’ benefits, tuition, safety and illegally downloading music.
CollegeInvest, Colorado’s nonprofit higher education financing resource, is helping families translate how the law — which is hundreds of pages long — will affect college affordability.
Officials at the University of Colorado, and schools nationwide, are waiting on the federal government to hand down the regulations. There are various deadlines for when they go into effect.
The Higher Education Opportunity Act calls for an increase in the maximum amount for Pell grants, the most common form of financial aid for low-income students. The maximum award for 2008-09 is $4,731. The law would gradually raise that amount over the next six years, bringing it to $8,000 in the 2014-15 academic year.
The increased funding would be a welcome step toward assuring that low-income students will be able to afford college, said Janet Gullickson, chief outreach and client relations officer for CollegeInvest. But she pointed out that the authorization for those amounts doesn’t guarantee funding by Congress. The federal financial aid budget hasn’t increased in the past decade, so grant money gets shuffled around — meaning that an increase in Pell grants is the result of the loss of money for another type of award, Gullickson said.
At CU’s Boulder campus, 3,538 undergrads received Pell grants in 2007-08, according to Gwen Pomper, director of the financial aid office. The campus enrolls about 25,000 undergraduates.
The lengthy “Free Application for Federal Student Aid” form will also be scaled back to a two-page document. The new form will make applying for financial aid a less daunting task, according to CollegeInvest. The organization and CU encourage all families to fill out the form.
“We tell students to go ahead and fill it out because they may be surprised that they are eligible for aid,” Pomper said.
About 72 percent of in-state undergraduate students completed the form last year, she said.
The new federal law will also lead to the creation of Web-based calculators that provide students and families with early estimates of college costs, and allow them to predict the annual and total cost of a college education based on each school.
Other measures include helping colleges recruit students with disabilities; creating a new scholarship fund for military personnel and their families; starting programs to bolster students’ interest in science, technology and critical foreign languages; and requiring schools to come up with ways to squelch illegal downloading.
By Brittany Anas (Contact)