Financial Aid Program Gets Axed

The Experimental Sites Initiative, a national student financial aid program, is slated to be dissolved by the end of June.

Introduced in the 1995-96 academic year, the program aims to diversify ways for higher education establishments to disperse aid by relaxing certain academic requirements so educational institutions have more leeway in implementing alternative funding methods.

The program itself currently includes 109 colleges and universities across the United States. Each institution experiments with new strategies for saving money and educating students.

Successful results get passed to legislators and may become instituted as laws or regulations.

Ability to Benefit, one such effort, was adapted to allow students who do not possess a high school diploma to gain college admittance. But certain stipulations, including grade requirements in college level classes, still apply.

Dismantling the program would not only reinstate restraints on some schools, it would also deprive every higher education establishment in the United States of the potential to save money, according to Philip R. Day Jr., the president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid and Administrators.

Day describes his misgivings and regret over the decision in a two-page plea to U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, urging him to reverse the order to end the program.

“The concept behind the law was to allow a representative sample of higher education institutions to use alternative financial aid administration and ... The department would work with Congress to have successful alternatives enacted into law,” Day wrote.

After integrating certain points of the program, the results were advantageous to all people involved, according to Day.

“Resources, both financial and human, are freed to better serve student aid recipients and their parents,” he wrote. “Students benefited from target compliance activities rather than jumping through hoops simply because they are there.”

Although the University of Cincinnati is not among the 109 on the list of schools participating in the Experimental Sites Initiative, financial aid is still a large part of student life.

“For undergraduates, there are a little more than 20,000 [students receiving aid],” said Connie Williams, director of Student Financial Aid at UC.

The maximum amount of financial aid students can receive from UC is the direct cost. This amount is equal to the cost of room and board, tuition and a book allowance.

But federal aid can help augment a student’s financial aid figure with allowances for transportation and miscellaneous items, according to Williams.

An in-state UC student living in the residence halls can expect to pay up to $27,471 per year, Williams said.

“If [financial aid] was canceled, I’d have to take time off to work,” said Keafer Mock, a first-year mechanical engineering student from Northern Kentucky, who lives in an apartment close to campus. “If the school were to cancel tuition reciprocity, I would have to transfer.”

The Department of Education could not be reached for comment.