Cal Grant Scholarship Program Falls Short of Goal

The state’s ambitious Cal Grant program has fallen far short of its goal to provide scholarships for every needy student with good grades.

With a budget of $128 million to expand the program, the California Student Aid Commission handed out college grants this year to only 1,016 more students than it did last year. The program’s goal was to expand the number of grants by about 25,000, to 102,000 students.

So few students received grants that the commission returned $35 million to state coffers unused. And commission officials could not fully account for how the remainder of the money was spent.

They acknowledged, however, that a significant part of the money was used for ongoing grants to college students, rather than for an expansion of the program to other needy applicants, as legislators had intended.

Critics, including the commission’s own advisory board, say a burdensome application process and poor outreach kept many California students from learning about and navigating the grant application process.

“We saw a number of structural obstructions to getting an award,” said state Sen. Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento), who wrote the bill to expand the Cal Grant program. “It’s a real strong statement about how bad our outreach is to poor and immigrant families.”

Counselors at some of Ventura County’s 12 high school districts agreed the multi-page grant application was lengthy and confusing but said all seniors were made aware of the money and ample opportunities existed to get help filling out forms.

“We advertise a lot at our school, but students often don’t apply or don’t follow through,” said Betty Patterson, one of five full-time student counselors at Channel Islands High School in Oxnard.

Gov. Gray Davis expanded the Cal Grant program a year ago, providing a total of $1.2 billion to help pay tuition for all California high school graduates with a “C” average or higher who need financial assistance to attend college.

Eligibility requirements differ depending on the type of Cal Grant but, in general, a student must live in a family where income and assets do not exceed certain totals established by the state. For example, the maximum household income for a student living at home with a parent and three siblings is $59,000.

Billed as “the nation’s leading ‘dollars for college’ program,” Cal Grant forms the cornerstone of a larger goal to make any California community college or four-year university affordable to any eligible student in the state.

The prospect of expanding the program to reach even more students was so popular that 64 legislators co-wrote the bill last fall to enlarge its scope.

But the student aid commission was not prepared to handle the extra workload and complexity of the application process in the first year, according to an analysis by the Assembly Higher Education Committee.

“[It’s] a sign that the program may be in jeopardy,” analyst Paul Mitchell wrote in a report to the higher education committee. “At a minimum, the committee should be gravely concerned.”

The program did meet one of its goals--to increase the number of grants given to recent high school graduates. The commission approved grants for 48,358 freshmen this fall, compared with 39,000 a year ago. That improvement was nearly offset, however, by a drop in new grants to college students, mostly those in community colleges.

Grants Renewed Rather Than Expanded

Sarah Tyson-Joshua, chief of policy and communications for the California Student Aid Commission, said much of the money designated for the expansion of the Cal Grant program actually went to renewing grants for current college students.

Ortiz said that ran afoul of the spirit of the expansion legislation.

Many applicants had trouble just filing the right paperwork. Nearly 30,000 applications were rejected for missing or incorrect information. Another 50,000 could not be matched with high school records. Untold numbers of qualified college-bound students never applied at all.

“Apparently we’re not getting through to students and families that these grants are available,” said Assemblywoman Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara), who heads the Higher Education Committee.

One problem was the application form. High school seniors nationwide who apply for any kind of financial aid are required to fill out a federal form. To receive a Cal Grant this year, California students also had to send a form verifying their grade point average to the state student aid commission. Some high schools sent the information directly to the state while others gave the information to students to submit.

About 50,000 GPA verification forms sent to the commission could not be matched with the Social Security numbers of students who turned in federal applications, the student aid commission said.

The commission can only guess that the rejected GPA forms were sent by high schools for students who did not end up applying. But no one is sure because the state has not determined which schools the discarded GPAs came from, Tyson-Joshua said.

Commission officials do know, however, that students from schools that have full-time college counselors who presumably understand the application process received grants at a higher rate.

Jan Ryder, a counselor at Granite Hills High School in El Cajon, said the smaller and poorer school districts that most need assistance have fewer staff members to help students with Cal Grant applications. Her concern is greater for students left to mail grade reports on their own.

“The poorest students may barely see college as an option already,” Ryder said. “We don’t need another hurdle to discourage them from trying to go.”

Of the 285 schools listed by the student aid commission as having the fewest students entering college, many are in isolated and economically depressed areas. These include 27 of 47 high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, five of six in the Antelope Valley Union High School District and all three high schools in Compton.

One such school in Ventura County is Fillmore High School, where fewer than 22% of graduating seniors, on average, apply for admission to a four-year university, officials said.

Al Arguelles, one of two full-time student counselors at Fillmore High, said grant applications are a “nightmare” for parents, many of whom are poor Latinos with limited English and no post-secondary school experience.

Applications Were Made Available

“The kids bring these applications home and say ‘Where do I start?’ and ‘What do I do?’ and many of them wind up bringing them back to me with just their name on it,” Arguelles said.

At Fillmore High, there were 50 seniors in the 2000-2001 graduating class who received Cal Grants, even though applications were handed out to nearly the entire senior class--more than 175 students. Still, school officials said 50 recipients was a high number.

Patterson, at Channel Islands High, said more than 500 seniors in the 2000-2001 class received Cal Grant information and that 72 students received the state funds. A year earlier, the number of recipients was 40.

“It’s very disappointing,” Patterson said, “but it’s not like we’re not trying and encouraging them.”

State Education Secretary Kerry Mazzoni warned principals in January that the Cal Grant program would reach its goals only if counselors made an extra push to inform students that the grants were available.

“While we are intent on getting every application,” she said, “this is especially true for those students who are from our neediest and most underrepresented populations.”

The system also slights community college-bound students, said Kate Jeffery, a member of the student aid commission’s grant advisory committee and director of student financial support for the University of California.

By the time the Cal Grant deadlines roll around, UC and Cal State applicants already have filed paperwork to meet university admission deadlines. But community college students often put off paperwork--including financial aid applications--because they often do not register until the last minute.

“Cal Grant’s deadlines don’t make sense for students who don’t know where they’re going next fall,” Jeffery said. “It’s a little contradictory to say we’re surprised that not everybody applied on time.”

Countered Granada Hills High School college counselor Carol Radin: “We figure getting your grades to your college is the students’ responsibility . . . By the time they graduate, we’ve babied them enough.”

The California Student Aid Commission, under pressure to reform the assistance process, now plans greater outreach to students and parents.

Earlier this month, the commission mailed fliers to every high school, encouraging students to file the federal aid form online--https://www.fafsa.ed.gov--before the March 2 deadline.

In the next six months, high school and college admissions counselors plan to visit the 285 high school campuses at which students are least likely to attend college to help with applications.

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Times staff writer Holly J. Wolcott contributed to this report.