The U.S. Senate approved an amendment 50-45 Wednesday that will keep the Bush administration from altering the federal student financial aid formula.
The proposed revisions to the U.S. Department of Education's formula would reduce the amount of money the federal government doles out for college by $270 million next year and could affect up to 100,000 students nationwide. The amendment is attached to a bill that is set to finance other federal departments. The bill's next stop is a joint House-Senate conference committee.
While the maximum amount students can receive from Pell Grants would increase by $100 to $4,100 for the 2004-05 award year under the Bush plan, many other aid programs may be reduced beginning in the fall 2004 semester.
Pell Grants are given mostly to low-income undergraduate students who don't have to pay the money back.
Programs whose funds are on the chopping block include the Perkins and Stafford Loans and the Supplemental Educations Opportunity Grant programs.
The formula determines students' financial needs based on their families' incomes. It then deducts state and local taxes, which vary from state to state, to determine a student's unmet educational need.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
The revisions would "affect how need is determined," said Ron Martinez, director of financial aid at UNM. "It would mean that fewer students are eligible for financial aid, and any kind of decrease would hurt our students."
According to UNM financial aid figures, the University paid $22,832,000 in Pell Grants to 8,599 students during the 2002-03 award year.
New tax tables, which until this year hadn't been changed since 1994, skew perceptions as to how much money students and their families can contribute to education, Martinez said.
"It would appear, on paper at least, that families have more disposable income," Martinez said. "But, as usual, the economy has gone down" since the tables were last updated.
In a July 31 letter addressed to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige wrote: "With regard to your concern about the timing of the update, I do not know the reasons the previous administration did not annually update the state tax allowance table after 1994-95."
With rising tuition costs - UNM's is up a combined 12 percent this year for graduate and undergraduate students - and a sagging national economy, Marinez said opponents of the revisions fear now is the wrong time to cut federal aid.
"People who are upset with (the revisions) are saying, 'this just hurts poor people while they're down,'" he said.
One way New Mexicans can escape the possibility of losing Pell Grants, Martinez said, is the Lottery Scholarship.
The scholarship currently pays more than 5,000 UNM students' tuitions.
Leading national Democrats say the Bush administration's revisions to the financial aid formula are detrimental to students.
"The problem we've got is that the expense of education is going up, we all understand that, but the programs to help with it aren't good enough," Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said.
Paige disagrees.
"Let me assure you that President Bush and I have made funding Pell Grants one of our highest priorities," Paige wrote to Lieberman.
