Week 12 Reading

The question of who I picture receiving financial aid is an interesting one because I believe that almost everyone I know, to some extent, receives some kind of aid. As the introduction laid out, costs of attending college in many categories creates the need for all kinds of families to require assistance, even those who may not have pressing finance struggles. “The financial aid system was built to help with these challenges by offsetting the price of college for financially constrained families, thereby making college affordable.” However, despite this intent, we know that aid doesn’t cut it in the slightest for so many American families. As mentioned in chapter two, the prices are just that astronomically high.

The reading has affirmed what I assumed to be true about aid recipients which is that they seem to only exclude the very rich. Some words that come to mind are lower-income, middle-income, single-parent family, multiple siblings, housing/food insecure and any ethnic group. As someone who does receive a decent amount of aid and has been on programs such as free and reduced lunch for most of my life, I do picture myself as part of this community. However, as I mentioned before, I had many friends in high school who I knew to come from a financially stable family who also relied on receiving aid to attend school. The reading also mentions that those from high-income families are most likely to graduate, followed by middle-income families and with lower-income families finishing the least often.

I was very interested to learn about how the Pell Grant came to be, as well as how it functions now. Before doing this reading, I couldn’t even identify who Pell was. I just knew that I always received a Pell Grant and though I was grateful for it, it didn’t really make much of a dent in what I had to pay. Chapter 1 explains that Senator Claiborne Pell was a member of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Education. In 1971, this group was looking to make college more accessible to groups that were vulnerable to ending up with student loans to attain a bachelor’s degree. They created the grant with the intention to ease burdens of this group as well as make college an option for those who could not attend at all without assistance. Implementation of the grant also coincided with Congress investing in job programs, indicating to Americans that there are many options one can take to achieve success in a field of work. Though the grant is appreciated by students, research over time has come to show the best indicator for a student’s success and ability to complete college has more to do with their family’s financial background. Students from wealthy families more often finish on time and those from lower-income families may run out of resources before they are able to finish. It seems that while the Pell Grant did make an initial difference for its recipients, it could not keep speed with the ever-rising costs of attending university.

I also had no idea about the controversy surrounding the distribution of Pell Grants and was unaware that some viewed it simply as welfare. Some feel that the grant is a waste in the hands of many students who require additional time to graduate or may never graduate at all. There is also a notion that students are participating in high levels of fraud pertaining to their grant by “pell running” in order to receive the grant from multiple sources with the intention to receive it in a refund. However, we see that most evidence supporting this claim is anecdotal and assumptive, and that accusers are often speaking without context. Students receiving cash back generally require this money to survive. Research in this chapters 2 and 3 shows that students are not generally spending money their money on necessities and not on frivolities as they are portrayed. Additionally, it seems ridiculous to frame the fact that some recipients might be doing poorly in their classes or don’t graduate around the idea that they are taking advantage of receiving assistance. Many opinions like these from higher-ups seem to lack context or understanding entirely. They want to show students for the greedy, money-hungry people that they see us to be without considering that many students are struggling to survive and are navigating school on top of their other financial and life pressures.