Financial Aid For Thousands Of Students Unfunded Due To Budget Cuts

Reporter Marci Manley with our content partner, KARK 4 News, reports that thousands of professional school higher education students are facing significant financial hurdles due to state budget cuts.

The cuts could hit hardest those students attending dentistry, optometry and veterinary schools out-of-state.  Arkansas doesn’t have those specific professional schools.

The news was first reported by the Arkansas Times, which you can read at this link.

From KARK 4 News:

“It’s a significant amount of money these families and students are going to have to come up with, somehow, if they pursue the studies,” said ADHE Interim Director Shane Broadway.

According to Broadway, lawmakers had been warned about the funding issues since 2007, when reserve funds began to be depleted ahead of schedule.

The reserve had been built up to fund these higher education scholarships. It was projected to last until 2017, Broadway said. Then, several factors, including an online application process and the scholarship lottery, began to deplete the reserve. More students realized that it was easier to apply, they applied for multiple scholarships, and qualified, quickly depleting the monies that had trickled out slowly in the days of a difficult, paper application process.

The legislature, Broadway said, decided to take $20 million of the reserve fund and set it aside as a crisis fund in 2008 in case the lottery failed to do well in the future, allowing for scholarships to be fulfilled.

That, however, increased the reserve spending, cutting the projected end date from 2017 to today, Broadway said.

“It’s difficult choices and those choices impact on lives,” he said.

The department needed an additional $5 million to fund the 24 scholarship programs it had, aside from the lottery scholarships. Lawmakers appropriated an additional $2 million to save the Governor’s Distinguished Scholar program. The cuts would have to come from somewhere.

That left the 23 other higher education funds facing funding shortages, so cuts had to be taken.

“We did across the board cuts to each of those programs based on their budgets,” Broadway said.

It essentially eliminated aid for 4,600 students who would have had it otherwise. For veterinary school slots, it cut the program nearly in half.

Read more on this subject here, including comments from one student’s father, David Ballin. His daughter, who teaches in the Delta will be deeply affected by the budget cuts.  She was hoping to attend LSU’s veterinary school this fall.

“Those of us looking at financial aid for education know that July first student loan interest rates will double,” Ballin said. “It’s also a month out from the start of school. So in a month, my daughter may have to find an additional $30,000 for this year — $100,000 over the next four years.”

Bailin believes it sends the wrong message to students.

“We’ll give tax breaks to major companies as incentives for them to move here, millions in subsidies, on the bet they’ll be open in four years. I just think we would put the same bet on our students,” he said. “And if this isn’t rectified, if they don’t hold up their end of the deal, I plan to do everything I can to change this legislature, because they have their priorities wrong.”