Bush Announces Financial Aid Plan

President George W. Bush announced his intention to allocate $3.7 billion over the next five years in financial aid for low-income college students who excel in math and science, as part of his 2007 budget released Monday.

The new initiative is in line with the president’s general efforts to retain young American’s interest in technological innovation.

The budget’s “Academic Competitiveness Initiative” includes the “Academic Competitiveness Grants” program, providing aid for eligible low-income students in their first two years of college, and grants for students in their third and fourth years majoring in “critical areas like science, math, technology, engineering, and foreign languages vital to national security,” according to the White House website.

For Harvard students to benefit from this aid, they must be a US citizen eligible for Pell Grants. As of January last year, 600 Harvard students were receiving Pell Grants.

The Financial Aid Office was not available for comment yesterday.

Harvard Director of Federal and State Relations Suzanne Day said the proposed grants will not affect Harvard students in a significant way.

“I think that Harvard’s aid package is extremely generous now,” Day said. “It is unlikely that this will cause a great shift in the amount of funding.”

According to Day, students who are eligible for Pell Grants and could potentially benefit from the aid, are already receiving large grants from the University. This is due in part to President Lawrence H. Summers’ recent financial aid initiative guaranteeing a nearly full aid package for households with income under $40,000, which took effect in September, 2004.

However, the new federal grants will have a larger impact on the aid packages for students at many other colleges with less comprehensive financial aid programs.

Some schools have raised questions over the languages being considered “vital to national security,” Day said.

According to Day, the list of languages includes Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

The concern is that the selection of “eligible majors” will favor students studying specific subjects rather than providing aid to those most in need. This problem should not have any major effects on Harvard, Day stressed, because its financial aid program is not dependent on federal funding.

The new Academic Competitiveness Grants also may potentially fail to meet the full needs of students due to the nature of the grants which are “mandatory dollars” and cannot exceed the budgeted amount. This is in contrast to the Pell Grant, which frequently runs a deficit.

The coming academic year will serve as a test year after which the program will have to adjust the size of its grants to remain within budget.

“What is unclear, is what happens when the number of students eligible is different from the projection,” Day said.

While these grants increase the total amount of financial aid funding, President Bush announced in the same budget his plans to cut the Education Department’s discretionary budget by $1.51 billion for the coming year.

—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu.