October 30, 2007

U. of Wisconsin-La Crosse Drops Plan to Raise Need-Based Aid and Diversity

The University of Wisconsin at La Crosse is withdrawing a contentious plan to expand its need-based student aid with an increase in tuition. The proposal, called the Growth and Access Agenda, would also have increased enrollment by 1,000 over five to eight years.

The university’s chancellor, Joseph Gow, said a quarter of the money raised by a $1,320 tuition increase over three years would have gone toward need-based financial aid. The other 75 percent would have paid to hire 130 faculty and staff members.

“Because we can bring in needier students, the hope was to increase diversity in the student body,” Mr. Gow said on Tuesday.

But state legislators failed to include the plan in the 2007-9 biennial budget because they were uncomfortable with putting increased tuition into financial aid. “They were not in favor of using one student’s tuition to pay another student’s financial aid,” Mr. Gow said.

In the next couple of weeks, Mr. Gow said he expects to propose a differential-tuition plan that will derive need-based aid dollars solely from state funds. The increase in tuition will not be high as $1,320 and will affect only students who enroll next fall.

He insisted that socioeconomic and racial diversity remain important goals for the university. But “we are not awarding financial aid based on race, and we will not do so in the future,” Mr. Gow said. —Mary Andom

Comments

1. Sounds like the legislature thought the university was trying to play Robbing Hood.

   — Joseph F Foster    Oct 31, 08:21 AM    #

2. Mr. Gow is misguided – the goal should be to provide students with a superior education at the lowest possible cost.

   — TRB    Oct 31, 08:26 AM    #

3. What TRB says makes sense on its face and is hard to argue with. Of course everyone wants high quality and low cost. But costs are going up (and prices are going up even faster), aid is shifting from grants to loans, and systematic societal forces are preventing certain students from gaining access to SES-lifting higher education (e.g, the least qualified high school students in the highest SES quartile are and the most qualified students in the lowest quartile have the same likelihood of going to college, according to The Education Trust). Gow is not, in my opinion, misguided in trying to direct resources to need-based aid. Higher education can work to maintain social injustice, or to repair social injustice. Yes, let’s keep quality high and price as low as possible, but let’s also work to include those who are the neediest financially as the wealth gap widens further and further in this country.

   — dpc    Oct 31, 09:25 AM    #

4. Right – for all, and only, those who can afford it. And the devil take the rest who can’t. Financial aid is an important, and appropriate, incomes-distribution method (if you have to see it in such terms) that is ultimately good for all of society. Maintaining economic disparities ultimately erodes social structure and makes for a society that cannot support a democracy. Financial aid is one small brick in the structures that work to prevent such outcomes. And no matter how it’s funded, directly from the tuitions of those who can afford the costs of higher ed unaided, through state funding, through private foundations, etc., ultimately it is those who can afford the costs who subsidize those who cannot. Which is a good thing, overall, not a bad one. Otherwise, what? Just forget those who genuinely cannot afford the costs of higher education? Not a good idea! The aid to enable their attendance has to come from somewhere. It’s best, and in the end, unavoidable, that it be from those who can afford it.

   — David    Oct 31, 09:59 AM    #

5. It seems to me that using tuition increases to aid those who have trouble affording college in the first place is an exercise in circular logic. The less affluent students are still subjected to higher costs thus the increased aid only goes to pay the increased tuition. Where’s the gain? Personally I don’t fault those who were aprehensive about this plan.

   — Bob    Oct 31, 12:26 PM    #

6. Bob-

   The theory is that students requiring aid would get additional aid in excess of the tuition increase, thereby lowering actual cost of attendance.

   — Dan    Oct 31, 03:27 PM    #

7. Hey David, Get your sticky hands out of my pocket. The 18 yr old that can afford a college education from funds he produced does not exist. They get the money from their parents. The parents that can not afford to send their children to college, for the most part, knew that at the time of the child’s conception, if that question was ever entertained at all. Now you say that it is my duty to educate these offspring as they enter their third decade on this planet. Wrong. This country in now 30 trillion dollars in debt due to this type of thinking. So yes, let the devil take them.

   — Paul    Oct 31, 07:07 PM    #

8. Wow, Paul. You really feel you have no duty to improve the lot of your fellow man? I find that very cold. I hope you never find yourself in the position of living and raising a family at or around the poverty line. There are few options available for those folk to save any money at all, let alone for college. And you would deny qualified kids from those families because you don’t want to pay an extra few percent tuition? How noble and humanitarian of you.

   — robert    Nov 1, 10:33 AM    #

9. Robert, Maybe people living at or around the poverty line should hold off having children so we don’t have to worry about how noble you or I want to be. And maybe people responding to my views should be less sarcastic and state their business in a more straighforward way.

   — Paul    Nov 1, 04:13 PM    #

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