I guess you have to decide whether you want everyone to have free college or only the best students students. Hope and BF and many of the other state programs don’t cover half their students. Florida’s program did drop a good number of students when it changed the ACT requirement from 22 to 26. I think a student who has a 3.3 and 25 ACT are well qualified for college.
My daughter didn’t qualify for BF even though she was in the top 1/3 of her class, had a 3.4 gpa because she didn’t have the foreign language (we moved during high school, twice, and although she had a year of latin and 1.5 of French, she didn’t have 2 in one language). She also didn’t have an ACT of 26. She is a good student in my view but got nothing from the state program.
Does GA not require a test score to qualify for Hope? It’s fine if CC members don’t think those with a gpa under 3.0 should go to college, but they DO go, and the proposal from Clinton is based on income, not student stats.
One difference is finaid folks are supposedly bit onto what the usual deceptions are.
And you can legally share a residence during and after a divorce (maybe this is by state, don’t know. But def in CA.) Plus deception isn’t about fighting each other.
It’s not clear why there should be any upper limit, if college is supposed to be “free”. Given that the upper income earners pay so much in taxes that they sponsor others for “free tuition” every year, why can’t they take advantage of the same benefit for the small number of years that their children go to college?
A wise move the legislature would be to only make this available to everyone, but only at state schools. Most wealthy parents will choose private schools even if full pay.
I find it hard to believe that any state would have a law that prohibits a divorced/divorcing couple from living together. In any event, if a divorced couple did share a residence, FAFSA would require financial information from both parents.
“A wise move the legislature would be to only make this available to everyone, but only at state schools. Most wealthy parents will choose private schools even if full pay.”
But then they’d want vouchers for the private schools. There will always be some complaint.
@twoinanddone no GA doesn’t require test scores. As for the foreign language, it’s required to attend any public 4 years university in GA. So you need it either way. Even if you have less than a 3.0 in HS you still qualify for the Hope grant for GA technical colleges. As I said up thread if you are a late bloomer you a given a chance to earn Hope in college after completing 30 credit.
BF can be used at private schools, and the resident student also gets $3000 as a grant to go to the private school in Florida. This (grant) is to reduce the overcrowding in the public colleges. If the feds start paying for the instate students, what happens to all these programs?
@ucbalumnus But if you wanted to be fraudulent, why would it have to be a contested divorce? And one spouse could just claim to live with a friend and spend time with other spouse. My point is just that if there is a concern people will claim to be separated, they can do so now under the current system. Some colleges do not require info from both parents (I know several divorced people – legit divorces – no fraud – and only custodial parent is considered plus direct support from other parent but not full income like it would be if they were married).
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Aren’t there incentives for that now? You can get divorced and have only one parent’s income count (other than support from other). You can lie about custodial parent (or how much time is spent with each parent if that is the determining factor). You can hide income now. All geared toward getting more aid.
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Yes, true. But, really that’s mostly just to get a 5700 or less Pell Grant…not totally free college…and that’s really only when one parent is earning little.
With the $125k threshold, you could have a two-earner couple, each earning $110k pretending to be separated.
There’s just too much of an incentive to hide income/assets with that $125k threshold. Think about it. Two neighbor families…one household with an income of $124k and the other with an income of $126k. Do you really think that most of the $126k households would just “suck it up” and pay full tuition for their kids while their neighbor that earns a couple thousand less and gets free tuition for theirs?
Means testing like this is a bad idea. There should simply be incentives for states to drop their instate rates…for everyone.
Any hard cutoff whereby a family making $124k gets full free tuition and a family making $126k gets zero would make no sense. It would have to be phased out so that you got 100% free tuition up to a dollar income limit and amount of tuition covered was reduced at incomes above that to a point where it was totally phased out for incomes above that total phaseout cutoff.
Penalties for lying to the federal government would presumably apply (if caught of course but this would presumably be tied into income info the IRS has). Liability for fraud also could be non-dischargeable.
I still say that using a means test like that is crazy. The $125k family with 4 kids has less money to spend on college than the $125k family with 1 parent and 1 child.
It is considered fraud to get need based financial aid by willfully falsifying information on the FAFSA. If someone wants to try it…they run the risk of losing the aid, their admission offer, and getting convicted of fraud.
As someone from a state that has no programs for college tuition assistance…I would love to see something.
But let me add…I would also like to see more help for students in medical school. We NEED doctors. The debt is staggering for those entering medicine. We need primary care physicians the most…and those folks don’t have the same high earning potential as say…an orthopedic surgeon.
Re med school, I really have no sympathy for doctors who come out with $400K in debt. If you are smart enough to get into med school, you are smart enough to get a scholarship for an undergraduate college. Not doing so and taking out loans instead suggests a lack of wisdom.
The average medical school debt is about $183K, roughly in line with what a primary care physician can make each year. That doesn’t seem overly onerous.
That is assuming that a financial aid program of this nature would have a “cliff” at $125,000 where it is “all or nothing”. Like a lot of other things (including taxes/deductions/credits that have certain income thresholds, college financial aid programs that promise a certain amount of financial aid for families with income below $X, and Pell grants), the more likely implementation (if anything is done at all) would be a gradual phase-out, so that the difference between $124,000 and $126,000 is not all that much.
However, a student applying to medical school is lucky to get even one medical school admission. So s/he may not have a choice of choosing a less expensive one.
I don’t like having an income limit set to it. I think the program should be open to all kids regardless of how much their parents make or don’t make. We’ve all seen so many kids on here that parents can’t or refuse to help pay for college. I don’t think parents bad financial decision should hold a child back from a college education. The young lady who didn’t want to file for financial aid because she believed her parents were trying to commit some type of fraud and she didn’t want to be a part of it comes to mind.