Students across the state could lose hundreds of dollars in grants if a bill on Gov. Phil Bryant’s desk is passed into law.
The Mississippi Legislature recently approved an appropriation bill for the Mississippi Office of Student Financial Aid that would stop students from “stacking” grants. The bill limits students to receiving only one state aid grant. Students will receive the grant awarding them the largest amount but will not receive additional grants that they might have in the past.
Colleges and universities will also now check students’ GPA at the end of each semester to ensure they meet the required point average to keep their grant. Previously, this was only done once every academic year for some grants. These changes come only a semester after Mississippi students were newly required to take 15 academic hours instead of 12 to receive financial aid. Students who did not enroll in 15 credit hours or dropped below that number during the semester lost their state financial aid.
The grant changes are expected to impact 3,400 students, with an additional 430 being impacted by the GPA checks.
One of the students whose grants are on the chopping block is Cody Letchworth, a junior accounting and public policy leadership major from Kokomo. He received both the Mississippi Tuition Grant and the Mississippi Eminent Scholars Grant this semester. Next semester, he won’t receive the Mississippi Tuition Grant.
“It’s not fair to people that work so hard in high school and are told to work hard in school (to gain merit-based financial aid) to only have that ripped out from under them because our legislature puts education under the rest of their inadequate budget plans,” Letchworth said. “Even though MTAG is only $500 a semester, that’s $1,000 a year that you haven’t had to pay your entire college career, and then it’s just sprung on you out of the blue.”
Demand for state aid has increased over recent years. Just last year, the demand exceeded available funds by about $11 million.
“Our budget has seen a great deal of pressure for several years now,” Jennifer Rogers, director of the Mississippi Office of Financial Aid, said. “Had the legislature not made these changes, we might have been forced to prorate.”
A proration – a complete revision of budget – would affect all scholarships, grants and other state aid rather than the five grant programs that Mississippi now has. Not every student qualifies for more than one grant. Rogers estimated about 916 students at Ole Miss would have been affected if this rule had been implemented last year.
Laura Diven-Brown, director of Ole Miss’ financial aid office, said the school will not know the impact of this new rule until fall begins and monies really start to move. Then, the office will be able to compare the amount of state grant funding distributed among different academic years.
Rogers notified Diven-Brown of the change just a day after the bill was signed by the Senate. She said she had been told changes were probably coming but didn’t know the extent of them until she got the email.
The financial aid office ran reports and eliminated second grants for anybody who qualified for more than one of the five grants available to Mississippi students.
The grant programs affected include the Mississippi Tuition Grant, the Mississippi Eminent Scholars Grant, the Higher Education Legislative Plan for Needy Students, the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers and Firemen Scholarship and Nissan Scholarship.
MTAG and the eminent scholars grant were the first grant programs created in Mississippi. They began the 1995-1996 school year.
“They started when I started,” Diven-Brown said. “I came in August ’95, and there were applications everywhere.”
Although the need for these grants has increased since their inception, they’ve remained the same annual amount for the past 22 years.
Diven-Brown said most students losing a grant will be losing MTAG.
“I hope $500 a year is not going to make that difference as to whether you are recruited to our school or you can stay at our school,” Diven-Brown said. “I do think $1,000, especially for juniors and seniors that were expecting it all along, that is still a significant amount of money.”
Diven-Brown said it’s always sad to see financial aid being lost for students.
“All those little things that you can stack up are what makes the college financial plan look affordable,” she said. “I hate seeing those things go out.”
Diven-Brown recommends any student who is worried about financial issues or paying for college should meet with advisers in the financial aid office. They can help with figuring out how to fill the “gap,” including taking out loans. She also said to look for scholarships.
“For students who have that financial need, every little bit helps to get more money, and every little bit hurts to get less money,” Diven-Brown said.
The financial aid office sent around 48,400 emails out to more than 15,300 continuing and new students and their parents in an effort to let students know as soon as possible.
Alice McKelvey, a junior journalism major from Meridian, was doing homework when she got her email.
“As soon as I read the subject line of the email, I knew something not-so-great would be at the end of it,” she said.
McKelvey will be graduating a semester early in December. Until this point, she never needed to take out a student loan. She said she had been able to come to Ole Miss strictly because scholarships and state and federal grants have been able to help with the cost.
She’d received the Pell Grant, a federal need-based grant awarded to low-income undergraduates.
“The Pell Grant helped tremendously, but my mom recently remarried, which messed up my parents’ income bracket because my stepfather makes more money than my mom does, even though he does not pay for my education,” McKelvey said.
She lost the Pell Grant that paid roughly 75 percent of her tuition. Since this rule, McKelvey will lose another grant. McKelvey works every weekend for eight or more hours a day to help pay for everything but said she will still probably have to take out a loan for her final semester of college.
“People like me, and others in worse situations, need this money to keep our heads above water in a city that’s so expensive to live in,” McKelvey said.
Austin Norton, an accounting major from Saucier, said financial aid was what solidified his decision to come to Ole Miss.
“As a kid from south Mississippi whose parents didn’t go to college, my decisions on which school to go to was based off financial aid,” Norton said. “The state of Mississippi has continually tightened the requirements for financial aid, which leads me to wonder where the priorities of the state lie.”
Michelle Nguyen, a junior integrated marketing communications major from Ridgeland, said the thought of losing financial aid she’d worked all throughout high school to earn is scary.
Nguyen uses the money she gets back from grants toward textbooks and other living necessities like groceries and rent.
“Being here at Ole Miss is an incredible opportunity, and I honestly could not be here without a lot of my financial aid,” she said. “Students just like me have worked hard their entire life in school and want to further their educations who are here on scholarships and grants are now going to have to find different alternatives to make it work, even though we thought we wouldn’t have to.”
Multiple authors of the bill did not respond to requests for interviews last week. Gov. Phil Bryant has until next Thursday to sign the bill into law.
– Lana Ferguson
Taylor Lewis and Rebecca DeLuna contributed reporting to this article.
