If there were a race toward making college affordable, the U.S. government might be at the pole position.
Congress increased financial aid by $20 billion last year by cutting subsidy payments to private lenders.
Running behind Congress would be elite private institutions, like Stanford University - which waived tuition for low-income students - and Harvard and Yale, which have reduced expected family contributions for middle income students to less than 10 percent.
But public four-year universities and state colleges, unlike their wealthier counterparts, are nowhere to be seen in the affordablity race.
Lacking massive endowments of some Ivy League colleges, some public schools not only lack the money to compete, but their dependence on state funding and an unstable economy could further erode their accessibility if more budget cuts are on the horizon.
One public school competing in the affordability race has been the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Four years ago, it implemented a "no loan program" aimed at lower income students which has eliminated loans and replaced them with grants and private funds.
Harvard and Brown Universities have implemented similar programs during the past few months.
A lack of funds was not a concern in introducing the Carolina Covenant, a initiative started in the fall of 2004 that eliminated loans and allows low-income students to attend debt-free, said Shirley Ort, UNC's director of scholarships and financial aid.
Ort said the program didn't require entirely new funds to operate since the program's 1,400 current students already receive financial aid from the government, which makes up 30 percent of program's funding.
The remaining funds come from state grants, which make up 20 percent, and institutional and private funds, which make up 50 percent, she said.
The university started the program in response to the rising costs of education and to assure high-performing students from low-income backgrounds that North Carolina wasn't out of their price range, she said.
While the University of Nebraska-Lincoln couldn't afford implementing a "no loan college" program for low income students, the school is still serving a large amount of low income students, said Craig Munier, UNL's director of the office of scholarship and financial aid.
About 3,200 students receive Pell Grants annually, he said.
"At Brown University financial aid is a small percentage needed to keep up with need based students, they forgo charging tuition and board," Munier said. "Here (at UNL) financial aid is sizeable."
The North Carolina General Assembly's appropriations for need-based aid from 1997-1998 to 2008-2009, which increased by 849 percent, has helped the program flourish, Ort said.
"In 2003, we felt it was a good bet that the modest growth in state aid would continue," Ort said.
Her future goals for the program are to keep its retention rate, now at 90.6 percent, high and publicize the program in the state's kindergarten through high school programs, she said.
"We're really pleased with the students we have, we would like to recruit more," Ort said.
The lowered expected family contributions employed by Yale and Harvard Universities don't help low-income students but relatively upper-income ones with family incomes between $120,000 and $200,000, said Ben Miller, a program associate in the education policy program at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan education think tank.
"We wish those two schools were contributing more than one-third of one percent of their growth in endowments to student assistance," Miller said. "And specifically they contributed more of their wealth to low-income student preparation, recruitment, support, and retention."
The biggest college affordablity issue was whether or not state governments would cut funding for higher education, as they are apt to do during times of economic uncertainty, Miller said.
A bad economy combined with state aid cuts to schools could price out a college education, he said.
"College will become more affordable for the talented lucky few, while becoming less affordable for the masses," Miller said.
kevinzelaya@dailynebraskan.com
