Collegiate Times

State universities in Virginia have recently seen a drop in their percentage of students receiving Pell Grants. Pell Grants are subsidies provided by the federal government for low-income families. The average Pell Grant provides between $400 and $4,050 in aid to needy students.

Students whose families make up to $50,000 a year can qualify for a Pell Grant if they complete a Federal Aid for Students Application. There are no initial academic requirements, although students are ?required to maintain reasonable academic progress,? said Barry Simmons, the director of scholarships and financial aid at Virginia Tech.

?This usually involves maintaining a 2.0 GPA and passing 75 percent of the coursework,? he clarified.

At Virginia Tech, approximately 14 percent of the student body currently receive Pell Grants.

?For a land-grant university, this number is fairly close to average,? Simmons said. ?It might be slightly below. The average grant here at Tech is $2,180, so that puts us smack dab in the middle.?

Tech has experienced a drop in the number of recipients of the scholarship over the past few years.

?We see about a tenth of a percent drop every year,? Simmons said.

He speculates that the reason there has been a steady drop in the percentage of Pell Grant recipients is that ?as the applicant pool increases every year, so does our selectivity. Unfortunately, those from lower income groups do not do as well academically as those from higher income groups. Of course there are exceptions, but if you scale the entire population, that?s what?s true.? UVa?s percentage of Pell Grant recipients is lower, with about eight percent of their students receiving grants.

?Back in 1996, we had about an 11 percent Pell Grant population, but we have been unable to retain that number,? said Yvonne Hubbard, UVa?s director of financial aid.

?We believe that as the stature of the university has grown, so has the perception to low income students that UVa was not affordable to them. Those students began to believe that this university was no longer accessible,? Hubbard said.

Though Simmons insists that the number of Pell Grant recipients, ?is not an indicator of how well a school is doing with financial aid, but more of a proxy of what schools are doing with low income students,? there is still a decline in low-income applications. Because of this decline UVa and Tech are both taking outside measures to increase their affordability.

UVa has recently introduced a new financial aid program called AccessUVa.

?We developed AccessUVa officially two years ago so that low-income students would realize that UVa is affordable. Last year we had a significant gain of low-income students. Our number has leveled off this year but we hope to continue improving,? said Hubbard. ?We also have allotted 20 million dollars from federal, state, and school funds for loans and grants to students.?

Not wishing to be left behind, Tech is making improvements in their financial aid program as well. ?We had a big release of funds for our future programs,? said Simmons. ?In the past three to four years, we have increased our funds anywhere from four to six million dollars. We?re kicking in the money.?