GOVERNOR DANIELS’ TUITION-ASSISTANCE PROPOSAL

GOVERNOR DANIELS’ TUITION-ASSISTANCE PROPOSAL

On April 16, 2008, Governor Mitch Daniels publicly announced his intention to take action to markedly improve college participation, persistence and affordability in Indiana. This announcement was prompted in part by a report issued by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, as funded by the Lumina Foundation, suggesting that Indiana must increase the number of college degrees awarded by
10,000 annually to remain competitive in the 21st-century global economy. To put this goal in perspective, this represents an approximate 21 percent increase from our current rate of college degree production.

The governor laid out the basic framework of a plan to guarantee funding for two years of college to all prospective Indiana college students from families with income at or below the state’s median: approximately $55,000 per household. Essentially, the plan would fully cover the costs for tuition and
mandatory fees at Ivy Tech Community College. This represents a promise of about $6,000 — $3,000 each year — in college grant aid for all eligible Hoosier students. Additionally, the governor suggested that this aid should be transportable, allowing students to apply it toward the tuition costs of any Indiana public or
independent university of their choice and enabling these students to choose the college setting that best fits their needs and aspirations.

The governor cited two target subsets of future high school graduating classes he was hoping to affect: (1)students from the middle class who face serious difficulty in financing college costs, and (2) students from segments of the population with traditionally low college-going rates.

The governor’s proposal is compelling and its design is aligned with two of the Commission’s affordability recommendations:
 Simplifying Indiana’s state financial aid program (Recommendation #3)
 Ensuring affordable opportunities for the middle-income student (Recommendation #4)
Additionally, this proposal is consistent with the Commission’s Recommendation #5 — encouraging Indiana’s colleges and universities to add to or remodel their own institutional aid programs to ensure that opportunities are available for students from low-income families. The design of the governor’s proposal enhances efforts to encourage the state’s public universities to offer more need-based, wrap-around grant aid to students and allows the universities to make such programs even more robust.

Governor Daniels’ proposal has moved the discussion of college affordability in Indiana forward considerably and offered an attractive model for accomplishing some of the Commission’s key college affordability goals.