For once, the Bush administration is doing something I can't complain about ... almost.
House Republicans, under the lead of Team Bush, are attempting to overhaul a decades-old financial aid system for this nation's colleges and universities. The system, known as base guarantees, doles out money based not on a particular student's or institution's needs, but instead on how good they were at haggling for funds when the system originated in the 70s.
The base guarantee program has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to 4,000 institutions of higher learning over the years. The benefactors of this program, more often than not, came from schools with massive endowments, such as Harvard and Yale. Programs in the Ivy League typically collected anywhere from five to 12 times the median share distributed, according to a study by the New York Times.
The low-interest loans allowed by these archaic guidelines also dictate that Ivy League schools receive up to 20 times the median figure to provide loans to poor students. They also received five to eight times the median to fund work-study programs.
Despite the fact that the Bush budget will leave generations of Americans drowning in red ink, it also called base guarantees unfair and inequitable. I applaud their efforts to level the playing field for public institutions. But sadly, what should be an easy fix may get hopelessly lost in political wrangling.
Legislators from the Northeast are certain to decry any attempts to decrease funding, even as the population migrates south and west, toward wide-open spaces and increasingly cash-strapped universities.
A recent push by a handful of Republican legislators proposed penalties for institutions that raised their tuition too rapidly. These same legislators, which included the chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, have since withdrawn their proposal. Their reason: "Universities have acted on their own to restrain costs."
Right. I guess nobody told President Michael Crow or the Arizona Board of Regents.
Even among those who support an overhaul of the system, debate over exactly what that means threatens to stifle any real progress on the issue. University financial aid administrators want to scrap the current system entirely in favor of a "fair share" system based on equity. And the proposed legislation doesn't even begin to cover the fact that public colleges are governed by the same guidelines as private ones.
Compounding the problem even further is the fact that another contingent of lawmakers wants to scrap the current student-loan program, saying that allowing students to consolidate these loans at lower than market rates equates to a de facto subsidy.
But in reality, even the Republican gesture to overhaul funding doesn't get at the heart of the problem. Regardless of how you divide the pie, the real issue is that there's just not enough to go around. While doling out $400 tax cuts, Bush and the boys raped and pillaged educational funding.
While a fix is severely needed for the base guarantee system, even a redistribution of current funding would just take money from one poor college kid and give it to another one somewhere else. If real change were in the works, Republicans would spend time securing more funding for education, not bickering over how to divide the little bit that's left.
Brian Clapp is a biology and political science senior. Reach him at
