<p>Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm is proposing a significant boost in funding for the Michigan Promise Grant, a state-sponsored merit-based college scholarship program. The increased spending would be partially offset by consolidating several state-sponsored need-based aid programs and reducing their overall budget.</p>
<p>The story also quotes a researcher at the University of Michigan School of Public Policy who says her research indicates that "generous and transparent" state-sponsored merit scholarship programs like those in Georgia and Florida are actually more effective at increasing college participation among low- and moderate income students than need-based aid, which tends to be highly non-transparent and therefore discourages many students from even applying to college on the expectation they won't be able to afford it.</p>
<p>I see his point to some extent. It would be a tangible goal to know that a certain GPA would “earn” you the scholarship for college, rather than “guessing” what might happen with financial aid. The whole process is confusing at best and leads to a lot of false hope and disappointed students.</p>
<p>I doubt that the incremental funding increase would cover the overall tuition increase. However, it is encouraging that they are looking at a positive change of behavior as a desired outcome of funding a scholarship. </p>
<p>I think that GPA and standardized test scores are merely prerequisites, not the criteria for awarding merit scholarships. The criteria should be “the potential for the state or the donor to get back” from the student, not a reward for past work done.</p>
<p>As a family that could never take advantage of need based FA, this is a great news for us. This will encourage every student to do the best they can to have an opportunity to go to a good 4 year college. This will be extremly helpful to families where they couldn’t afford full fare, but are expected to pay full fare, and there are many of them out there.</p>
<p>Reward for hard work in high school, as opposed to reward for parents making a lifetime of bad decisions, is a step toward getting America back on the road to valuing the classic “American Dream:” Today’s model seem to be “have a good sob story and get ahead.” </p>
<p>Student from poor families can work hard to take tough classes and get good grades, just the same as middle class kids do.</p>
<p>Oldfort- I second this. More merit aid would indeed be encouraging and very helpful to students from middle/upper middle class who would like to attend private schools. As it is, I fear that these students will be “squeezed out” of some of our colleges or be forced to take on a large amount of debt.</p>
<p>Oh, yeah. The HOPE scholarship has worked out great for the University of Georgia – if your idea of “great” is a lily-white university in a state that is 30% African American. The 6% African American enrollment at Georgia is a disgrace and extremely damaging to the state as a whole to have the state university be so incredibly non-representative.</p>
<p>Which is the exact reason I’m against it. I’m a huge supporter of public, land-grant colleges and Michigan has one of the best which should continue to recieve tax support, even if it means a few instate privates should close.</p>
<p>But as a non-resident, my vote is worthless.</p>
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<p>IMO, a B average in HS is not too impressive, particularly if just packed with non-honors classes.</p>
<p>I like the plan – if strong efforts are made to inform poor families about the merit aid, and to provide those families with that information while the children are young enough to benefit from it. The information needs to be provided in a way that is understandable for parents who aren’t highly educated, and the information needs to be presented to everyone, not just the students whom the GCs think can go to college. </p>
<p>Poor families are not likely to have parents who have been to college, so the parents and kids tend to have no clue about what the kids need to do in school to be college bound. The information about what coursework to take, what grades to achieve, what tests to take needs to be given to them – verbally and in writing – each year in middle school and in high school.</p>
<p>From what I’ve seen in my state that offers merit aid for college, middle and upper class kids know about the merit aid from at least the time they are in high school. Virtually every middle and upper class college student from my state whom I know got some state-sponsored merit aid to go to school in state. </p>
<p>The first generation college students and poor students, however, don’t find out about the aid until at best they are second semester seniors. Many have never considered college because they erroneously assumed that they couldn’t afford to go. As a result, they didn’t bother to achieve in school or they took courses that didn’t put them on track for college. Another possibility is that they erroneously think that because they are low income, they’ll get free rides to college.</p>
<p>I think that the same amount of money should be given to students whether they choose to go to instate public or private schools. Students shouldn’t get more money for choosing to go to a private school.</p>
<p>You’re so right. I don’t deserve to go to college because my parents made bad decisions. I deserve to not be able to afford it. Makes perfect sense.</p>
<p>I think more money should be there for need-based aid. Usually the merit based people can get scholarships to help. Although I also think that every person should get atleast some aid to help.</p>
<p>“You’re so right. I don’t deserve to go to college because my parents made bad decisions. I deserve to not be able to afford it. Makes perfect sense.”</p>
<p>Yes, but also what about the people who made good financial decisions and do not get any financial aid?</p>
<p>The Michigan Promise Grant, as I understand it in its current form, awards money to graduating seniors on the basis of scores on a series of previously taken, mandated tests–beginning in middle school, I think–who will be attending an in-state college (I’m not sure it it covers vocational programs too). All students take the tests and all parents are informed in advance of the upcoming test and are encouraged to make sure their children are well-fed and in attendance on test day.</p>
<p>I agree with all of you. It’s unfair to be financially penalized for sacrificing and making good decisions. It’s unfair to be penalized (financially and otherwise) for having parent who are unknowledgeable or uneducated or obtuse or whatever. And it’s unfair for students to get lifetime penalties mostly because they attend lousy primary and middle and high schools. Obviously Michigan public schools will attract more high achieving students if they dump need-based aid in favor of merit aid. It’s equally obvious (review the UTexas Law School experience) that evaluating everyone with a single measure results in disenfranchisement of some groups. So how do we go about solving this problem? Tax credits don’t help the poor and need-based aid doesn’t help the middle class. Merit aid doesn’t help the middle 50%, the population segment most college students come from.</p>
<p>^Its definately a complicated issue. I don’t think there is any one “answer” to financial aid fairness and distribution. Basically individuals should just try to prepare themselves as well as possible and hope for the best. My family personally is not very high income, but we still managed to have some put aside. With the market its not nearly what it used to be, but its still something.</p>
<p>I’d like to see their need based programs have a merit component. I think it is better to give needy kids with promise more money than just giving it out to everyone who is needy. College (or vocational schools) really are not for everyone.</p>
<p>I also think future years aid should be based on prior year grades. If you average an A or B, then you keep your aid. If you average a C, then it is cut by 25%. If you average lower than that, then it is cut by 50%. This could also apply to tech/vocational schools. The idea is: Why subsidize an education when the kid should be doing something else?</p>
<p>Anyone attending a state university is getting a substantial subsidy from taxpayers, most of whom will not have children attending that university. Economists of education (Mark Blaug is one eminent example) have shown that operating government-supported universities is an income transfer from the working poor to the studying rich.</p>
<p>I’m in total agreement with OperaDad - there are a lot of people attending college who simply don’t belong there and won’t have a good outcome. I don’t want to exclude someone who can’t afford college but will succeed there by using limited aid to subsidize someone who might have more “need” but isn’t college material.</p>
<p>The transparency point is intriguing. I’d like to know more about the research that concludes clear and transparent merit-based aid programs have a bigger influence on the decisions of low- and moderate-income kids to go to college than need-based aid. It sounds plausible. Need-based aid on the whole is extremely non-transparent and something that students and their families generally can’t count on until extremely late in the process, once their individual FA offer is made. By that time a lot of lower-income kids will have foregone even thinking about college. </p>
<p>I do have some concern that shifting from need-based to merit-based diverts aid from the lower end of the income scale to the higher end. On the other hand it may not be a zero-sum proposition. If clear and transparent merit-based state aid gets more lower-income kids into college, the total amount of aid going to that end of the income spectrum might actually increase—while also positioning more kids from lower-income families to compete for higher-end jobs, earn higher incomes, and contribute more to the state’s economy. And political support for a uniform merit-based program might allow such a program to enjoy more taxpayer support over time, for exactly the same reasons that supporters of Social Security and Medicare have always opposed “means-testing” for those programs. If Social Security or Medicare were converted to income-based “welfare” programs, their political support would crumble, the programs would shrink, and over time they’d probably provide less help to those who need it because they wouldn’t be funded. Same, possibly, for taxpayer-supported FA programs. So what appears on its face to be a regressive move might in fact be a clever Rooseveltian stratagem to build political support for more taxpayer-supported FA.</p>