Federal grants reduced, eliminated

Director of the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships Dr. Kelvin Michael Francois informs students that financial aid will be reduced and some federal grants will be eradicated.

For the need-based and residential status based Texas grant, the university awarded $30, 646, 000 to 593 students during the fall 2010 to spring 2011 school year. 

The Pell Grant will also be reduced because the budget for that grant was well overspent. It was becoming too much to maintain so the government decided to reduce the grant by approximately $845 per student. 

Because the Pell Grant is not available for the summer, this may allow the grant fund to be sustained but with reductions to these grants, many students will need to cover those costs out of pocket.

The Academic Competitiveness Grant (ACG) and the National Science & Mathematics Access to Retain Talent Grant (SMART) are federal and need-based awards that will be obliterated next year because of lack of funding. 

The ACG awarded $422,500 to over 600 freshman and sophomore students and the SMART grant awarded $204,000 to 58 junior and senior students during this current school year.

Francois said: "I wouldn't say that this will affect students but it will make it a little more difficult to pay tuition and fees because that is money that is not received. This puts the director of financial aid and the financial aid staff in a position to begin looking for different avenues and ways to help students fund their college education. The university is also looking at ways to put money back into financial aid for students as well."

With these grants being eliminated, Francois projects that this will affect attendance at the university but not by too much. Another part of financial aid affected might be scholarships. 

Scholarship awards are still pending. Though endowed scholarship awards can never be spent towards anything but the actual scholarship, the interest from those awards can be put towards other university needs. 

The amount of money reduced won't be great according to Francois but any cutback will hurt students.

The Office of Financial Aid has recently placed an online help for scholarships for students in search of scholarship opportunities. 

With this tool students can input their information and receive updates on scholarships they qualify for.

"Watch your spending. Be more cautious of spending and saving.  Make sure to complete FAFSA as soon as possible, before August comes and it's time to start the school year," Francois said.