By Katie Albert
Justice Staff

Change is in the air after the elections, but lobbyists say they cannot yet tell which way the wind will blow for the cause of federal financial aid.

Aid lobbyists have toasted a successful 2000, but this year they are faced with a cast of new education officials with whom they are unfamiliar and with the threat of a slowing economy.

At an institution like Brandeis, where the price is high but the financial aid administrators strive to make it possible for all qualified students to afford to attend, significant changes in funding could make a big difference to applying students.

Just before the close of its last session, Congress approved what Clare Cotton of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts called “the best single-year appropriation for aid” in history for the year 2001.

According to the Department of Education, the new budget calls for a total of $54.2 billion dollars to be spent on federal student aid, a 5.5 percent increase from last year.

This includes all of the money spent on grants, work-study programs and loans.

Included in this budget is an increase in the maximum Pell Grant from $3,300 to $3,750 and a $77 million increase in work-study programs, to $1.011 billion.

Various other federal aid programs including TRIO, Leveraging Education Assistance Partnership (LEAP), GEAR UP, and International programs will also receive significant increases.

For experts, President-elect George Bush is difficult to rate across-the-board on his education platform. He has urged major increases in some programs, but lobbyists fear that others may be in danger.

Bush has nominated Roderick Paige, a Republican from Houston, as the next United States Secretary of Education. Bush said that Paige “has experience at every level of education,” but the nominee is predicted to look mainly at elementary and secondary education, which were at the center of the education debate during the campaign.

One thing lobbyists and many Democrats have been afraid of is that Bush will eliminate the direct loan program. The direct loan program allows students to borrow directly through their institutions without having to go through any banks or loan guarantee agencies.

Brandeis is part of the direct loan program and financial aid officers here are fond of it. “(The program) has created healthy competition to reduce interest and guarantee money,” Sherri Culp, associate director of financial aid at Brandeis, said.

At a Senate hearing last week, however, Paige told worried Democrats that the Bush administration has no plans to eliminate the program. The administration’s position on a lawsuit from lenders that challenges the low borrowing fees mandated by the program is not clear, however.

According to Culp, only some of the reforms approved by the last Congress may really make a difference to the approximately 55% of Brandeis students who receive some form of need-based financial aid.

“We have quite a few low-income students who can really benefit from the Pell Grant increase,” Culp said.

However, Culp did express disappointment that the increase was not greater.

“We always want more,” she said.

But the increase in work-study probably will not be of much significance to Brandeis students.

“We already have a healthy amount of work-study available anyway,” Culp said.

In fact, Culp reported that there is a $1700 dollar work-study allotment for each student at Brandeis and that this may go up. She added, however, that “fewer and fewer students are using work-study.”

Lobbyists are considering the concrete proposals Bush has made.

Cotton is the president of AICUM, which lobbies government officials on higher education issues. Brandeis is a member of the organization.

Like other observers, Cotton criticized what he called Bush’s “front-loading” of Pell Grants. Bush has proposing raising the maximum Pell Grant for first-year students to $5,100. Some say that the continual decrease in the grants after the first year will discourage most students from pursuing an education beyond community college.

“If Brandeis did front-loading, you'd call it bait and switch,” Cotton said.

On the upside, Cotton said it is good that Bush is not proposing entirely new programs.

“For what it’s worth, we've had eight years in which we have generated new programs,” Cotton said. “We don’t need any new programs. We need money in the programs that work. He is not offering a raft of new programs.”

Finding out whether more money can be coaxed out of Washington will be a matter of time.

“It's a wait-and-see game,” said Culp.

“The two basic uncertainties are the uncertainty over the economy and the uncertainty over the administration,” Cotton said. “It’s going to be hard to get anything done, but we’re paid to try.”