ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 18, 1997 TAG: 9703180039
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
Too many Virginia students with low grades are getting financial aid, say some on the State Council of Higher Education. But a closer look at the numbers tells a different story.
LIKE knights errant looking for a quest, any quest, members of the State Council of Higher Education appear about to settle on a new micromanaging crusade: telling Virginia's public colleges and universities how to distribute need-based financial aid.
Never mind that the alleged problem, the grades of too many undergraduates on need-based financial aid are too low, seems to exist mainly in the minds of Chairwoman Elizabeth McClanahan and like-minded council members with the crusading itch.
Or that the vast majority of Virginia students receiving state-funded, need-based assistance - more than 80 percent - have grade-point averages higher than C.
Or that the variation from campus to campus in the percentage of aid recipients with less than a C average is to be expected in a system that counts institutional diversity among its strengths. (Case in point: At Virginia Military Institute,the percentage of aid recipients with low grades is nearly double the statewide average - but at VMI, learning to adjust is by design considerably more difficult than average.)
Or, above all, that the percentage of aid recipients with low grade-point averages plunges with each class. While 28 percent of freshman on state-funded financial aid have averages below C, this is true of only 8 percent of seniors on financial aid.
The system, in other words, isn't stringing kids along, keeping them in school without a prayer of graduating. What it's doing, both the numbers and council Director Gordon Davies suggest, is giving kids a chance to adjust to the independence and tougher academic demands of college life.
Eventually, some won't make it, just as some not on financial aid won't make it. But more do. They overcome rocky starts to perform adequately or better as students. For Virginia, that's valuable: The quality of the state's 21st-century work force will depend not only on educating the cream of the academic crop but also on making education as widely diffused as possible.
Clearly, the state has a legitimate interest in how its financial-aid money is spent. Clearly, too, financial aid to a poor performer shouldn't continue indefinitely.
But unless real evidence of abuse emerges, let the rules continue to be set by the individual institutions, rather than by a new one-size-fits-all set of bureaucratic "guidelines" from Richmond.
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