Redesigning the Financial Aid System: Why Colleges and Universities Should Switch Roles with the Federal Government - Between the Lines

University Business, May, 2003 by Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti

By Robert B. Archibald; The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, 238 pp., $42.00

If the goal of financial aid is to make IHEs equally accessible to all students regardless of asset or income level, then the system is a failure, asserts the author of Redesigning, Robert Archibald. A conglomeration of legacy programs enacted at various points in U.S. history, financial aid has ceased to work efficiently and effectively for the benefit of students and universities, he says. To rectify this situation, Archibald proposes a radical plan: Switch the roles of the government and the university, so that loans are administered at the local level while grants come from the federal level. His exhaustively researched and meticulously reasoned argument may well win support for this dramatic proposal. Available at www.press.jhu.edu.