U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and officials from the College Board and MTV said that they are committed to helping college students access financial aid in a conference call with college journalists on Monday.
Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, and Jason Rzepka, vice president of MTV Public Affairs, joined Duncan to discuss the importance of access to college education—something that is often restrained by insufficient or confusing financial aid policies.
Caperton emphasized the fact that enacting financial aid reforms will take effort, especially during a recession.
“We’re going through a very difficult time with school budgets, with state budgets—particularly with national budgets,” he said. “This is not an easy thing. It’s going to take sacrifice from many people, people paying more taxes and rebalancing budgets that have not been balanced for a while.”
Caperton said that the College Board plans to spotlight universities that are currently providing educations at a reasonable cost, which would help motivate those that are not.
Duncan added that some significant changes have already been made on the national level, including changes to the Federal Pell Grant program, through which the government provides money to low-income students. An additional 2.4 million low-income students are now receiving these grants, Duncan said.
Duncan also mentioned that changes made to this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) are expected to make applying for aid significantly easier. “The form [was] far too long, too confusing—the form itself was an impediment to going to college. That was absolutely crazy,” he said.
Recently, Columbia announced that it was simplifying the way students would file their FAFSA forms. Columbia has moved from using individual federal school codes to one University-wide federal school code.
“We made the decision to unify our federal school code in order to better serve our students and expedite the processing of your federal student aid,” University Director of Financial Aid Mercy Goodnow-Smith wrote in an email to students Monday.
In addition to national initiatives focused on making higher education more accessible, Rzepka and Caperton brought up the “Get Schooled College Affordability Challenge,” a competition recently launched by MTV and the College Board to come up with ways to help students navigate the process of applying for financial aid.
The competition calls on young people to think of digital tools that make it easier for college students to find money for school, with a $10,000 prize for the winning concept, Rzepka said.
“We know that upwards of 2 million college students don’t apply for any of the nearly $70 billion that the government distributes each year. We really want to help,” Rzepka said.
For Duncan, these efforts are part of a much larger picture.
“President Obama has set an ambitious goal for the country. He wants America to again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by a decade from now, by 2020. That’s the North Star for all of our education efforts,” Duncan said.
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