State budget cuts diminish student aid
By Sarah Haefner | Feature Editor
Students at the University of Indianapolis had short notice of a statewide loss in financial aid this year, and university officials are attempting to compensate with a temporary assistance fund.
The State Student Assistance Commission of Indiana (SSACI) provides the Higher Education Award and Frank O’Bannon Freedom of Choice Award, grants that benefit numerous UIndy students. An insufficient budget increase forced SSACI to lower the maximum need-based grants that an individual student could receive from last year’s $10,992, to $7,584.
School officials anticipated a change in state financial aid but had no way of predicting the final state budget. Once the actual numbers were released on July 17, the university realized it would need to soften the blow to students’ wallets. A temporary assistance fund will help compensate up to $3 million of the $3.7 million lost due to the new caps.
“This is my 30th year working at the university as vice president for student affairs, and I can never think of a year when the cap had been adjusted this drastically and been lowered,” said Vice President for Student Affairs & Enrollment Management Mark Weigand.
The financial aid department worked to revise award letters, including a re-evaluation of the 1,150 students affected. If possible, they increased Stafford loan amounts, said Financial Aid Director Linda Handy.
“We tried to make the difference modest and in an amount that we thought students could absorb, especially given the late decision-making that we were all faced with,” she said.
Prior to the temporary fund, the average UIndy student would have lost about $3,100. With the temporary fund, the average student lost somewhere between $300 and $1,000.
The Indiana Commission for Higher Education recommended an 18 percent funding increase for student assistance this year in order to keep caps on SSACI grants relatively similar to the previous year, allowing students to obtain a comparable amount of state aid. This increase was needed because the number of FAFSA filers increased this year by more than 20 percent.
“More students were eligible because more parents are out of jobs and more students are going back to school,” President Beverley Pitts said.
However, the state budget, which was not passed until June 30 in a special summer session, called for a 6.5 percent increase in funding, a compromise from the 18 percent proposed by the Indiana House of Representatives and the three percent proposed by the Indiana Senate. This modest increase led to a 31 percent reduction in student state aid.
Replacement funds for state aid are being obtained through several university facets. No faculty and staff will receive salary increases this year, a decision President Pitts recognizes as a huge sacrifice.
“These are people that have families. They don’t make huge salaries. They, too, are happy they have jobs. They love UIndy,” she said. “They want our students to be here.”
Every budget in the university will be tightened with fewer conference trips, less entertaining and lowered equipment spending, but she said no educational aspects are in jeopardy.
“We are not shutting down any academic programs, classes are not going to get bigger,” she said. “We’re not sacrificing anything that affects the academic quality of the university.”
University officials hope the temporary assistance fund will prevent students from having to take a semester or year off due to inadequate financial aid.
“The majority of the loss the university picked up, and our hope is that students will still enroll,” Weigand said. “Right now our enrollment registrations for fall are up around 200 students over this time last year.”
The two-year budget passed at the end of June includes a three percent increase for state aid next year, so unlike this year, the amounts will not be a surprise. Hopefully, this forewarning will allow the university to provide students and families with a more accurate aid assessment.
