Students: why bother studying? - need for higher standards for financial aid to college students

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 1994 by Fred Mulcahy

CAN'T AFFORD to send your kid to college? Want to get a college loan or outright tuition grant? Your offspring has no high school diploma or equivalency degree? No problem. See the U.S. Department of Education. They give lots of loans and grants to people like this.

Until recently, I was a Federal grant coordinator and instructor in state community colleges in the East, Midwest, and Southwest. Over a period of 20 years, I saw many students--their tuition paid by Federal grants or loans--who were academically unprepared and couldn't handle college studies, as well as a few who were unwilling even to try. (The Department of Education does not require a high school diploma or equivalency degree for college tuition grants or loans, only a financial need.) I remember some of these students attending classes in Business Management who couldn't spell either word correctly.

Let me cite two specific cases. I was the advisor to an unprepared student attending a state community college with an enrollment of several thousand. He had been on a Federal tuition grant for four or five years in this upscale, rural school with dormitories, dining hall, and Olympic-sized swimming pool. He told me that, despite his efforts, he never had been able to get his grade-point average up high enough to graduate. As a high school dropout, he simply hadn't had the prerequisite studies necessary to take college credit courses. Nevertheless, as he said, going to this school was "a pretty good life."

The second is a less common, but nonetheless real, case of a student who was both unprepared and unwilling to try. As an instructor in an inner-city state community college--with an enrollment of nearly 10,000--I was advising someone receiving a Federal tuition grant plus a state subsidy grant. She had registered for Finance and two or three other relatively difficult college credit courses. Her transcript showed that she had a very low grade-point average, no high school diploma or equivalency degree, and had failed four assessment tests. (At this college, such exams were given as a regular part of the registration procedure, but were not mandatory; failing them did not affect a studnet's eligibility to enroll in credit courses.)

When I counseled her on the difficulty of the courses that she had registered for the probability of her failing them, she agreed, but indicated that she had no intention of graduating and getting a job anyway. She explained that, if she took a job, she would lose Medicaid, Aid for Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and possibly other welfare benefits such as subsidized housing. Moreover, she would have to give up on-campus child care (free to indigent students) and surrender her citywide student bus pass. She just was going along with her welfare agency's demand that she go to school.

Due to low grade-point averages, both of these students had been dropped by their respective colleges from time to time for a quarter or a semester, then had been able to re-enroll. (The Department of Education doesn't require recipients of grants or loans to maintain a minimum grade-point average.)

My intention in recounting these cases is not to condemn the students. It could be said they merely were availing themselves of their opportunities. (Many community college instructors have heard a student on a Federal tuition grant or loan say something like, "It sure beats working for a living.") Rather, they are meant to illustrate the results of no-strings-attached Federal tuition grants and loans, as administered by the Department of Education, combined with lenient college admissions policies.

The Department of Education administers approximately $6,000,000,000 in Federal Pell tuition grants (to slightly more than 4,000,000 students) and $15,000,000,000 in Higher Education Act Federally guaranteed loans to college students annually. Academic eligibility for these grants and loans is left up to the individual colleges. If the school has no assessment test or prerequisites for enrollment, students can get Federal grants or loans without proving they are ready for college.

Why do some colleges have lenient admissions policies? Let us examine the motives--both benevolent and monetary--of two-year state community colleges.

When state community colleges began to spread across the nation in the mid 1960s, easy access to a two-year college education was a first principle of the trend. (In the three states where I worked, each county had its own community college district.)

Also, most state community college governing boards are elected locally. They often have constituencies who insist on access for their members, some of whom may not have graduated from high school or acquired an equivalency degree.

Finally, the U.S. Department of Education, by not requiring admissions tests or prerequisites for the recipients of Federal grants and loans, prompts colleges to go easy on admission requirements for those receiving such funding. The Department of Education evidently considers rewards for merit as elitist. Whatever else might be said of state community colleges, they are not elitist.