Digging deeper for tuition

Black Issues in Higher Education, July 11, 1996 by Ronald A. Taylor

As if the assault on affirmative

action hasn't produced

enough ominous clouds over

higher education, the outlook

for graduate and professional

schools is becoming stormier

than ever.

Federal education spending cutbacks have

decimated the best-known federally funded

fellowship programs for African Americans,

setting off a scramble for a pot of private

foundation aid that has now expanded to

cover the gap caused by the federal spending

cuts.

Financial woes for graduate and professional students are

underscored by the record pace at which they are borrowing to

meet tuition needs. Between 1993 and 1995, the annual

volume of loans for grad students soared by 73 percent from

$4.4 billion in 1993 to $7.7 billion in 1995.

"There's no way that the private sector can pick up the

slack," says Dr. Allison Bernstein, director of the Ford

Foundation's education program.

She noted that Ford spends $5.5 million in fellowships

for students. The available money ranges

from as little as $15,000 to as much as

$30,000."

In light of the federal cutbacks,

however, she says, the

foundation is considering increasing

its fellowship spending

for African Americans

"We think the problems (facing

minority graduate and

professional students) are

long standing of under-representation.

The fair thing

to say is what can we do and,

at what scale," she explains:

"The one thing we can say without

equivocation is, that there is going to be more

pressure on private sources of funding," says

Thomas Rozzell, director of fellowships for the

National Academy of Sciences-National

Research Council.

`Hit' Disproportionately

The funding question is the most

visible element of the barriers facing

the African American, college

graduates who want to achieve a

degree beyond the undergraduate

level.

"It's the tip of the mountain of

politics surrounding graduate education,"

says Howard Adams, director

of the National Consortium for

Graduate Degrees for Minority ties in

Engineering and Science.

Adams is among the Black

advocates of Black graduate education

who say that the cutbacks in

higher education funding hit Blacks

disproportionately hard.

The system "steered Black students to

government trough just as it was drying up,"

says Adams of the flow of federal funds for

the key graduate fellowships to be funded by

the government.

He was referring to the Congressional

move to stanch the flow of federal funding

for graduate programs, notably the Patricia

Roberts Harris and Jacob Javits fellowship

programs.

"In a budget that's very tight, some

otherwise important and very worthy

programs end up getting short shrift," says

one high ranking U.S. Department of

Education (ED) official of the budget cuts.

The remarks of this senior official were

made as the Clinton administration unveiled a

fiscal 1997 budget request that called for a

total of $30 million for graduate fellowship

programs -- a dramatic distance the

administration has come from the $112

million sought by ED for fiscal 1995.

In 1995, the ED requested $20.2 million - and

Congress appropriated $10.2 million - for

the Harris fellowships that provided

grants of up to $23,000 a year for

minority masters and doctoral candidates.

Since fiscal 1996, no money has been

requested for the Harris fellowship.

Budget requests for the graduate

assistance in areas of national need

program, which targets minorities

pursuing graduate studies in mathematics,

science and computer disciplines,

dropped from $27.5 million in fiscal 1994

to $27.3 million in 1995, where it has

remained through the fiscal 1996 and 1997

budget requests.

Just two months after the administration

proposed its fiscal 1997 budget to Congress,

the Council for Aid to Education came out

with more bad news for would be graduate

school students. it announced in its annual

report that foundation support for the

nation's colleges and universities was in a

period of stagnant growth. (see "Percentage of

Students Who Borrow by Race/Ethnicity").

The council estimated that the $12.75

billion given by foundations to higher

education in 1995 was a mere 3.2 percent

increase over the 1994 figure.

"Considering the impact of enrollment

and inflation together, inflation-adjusted

contributions per student were unchanged

from the prior year," the Council said in a

statement.

Muted Applause

For these

reasons, many

advocates of Blacks

in graduate school

asserted, the news

that a record number

of Blacks earned

Ph.D.s should be

greeted with muted

applause.

The dilemma facing would-be engineers,

physicians, college professors and research

scientists is finding the right pot of gold at a

time when private foundations are not

expanding.

According to scholars of graduate

education, grabbing a slice of the pie is tough

and likely to get worse as private foundations

try to spread their resources across an

expanding population.

Because so many programs have a

government contribution component in them,

it is difficult to nail down just how big the gap

is between what the federal government used

to provide and what is being asked of the

private foundations.

Still, college administrators lament, that

the task of making up the difference is a