Published: December 20, 2008 12:44 am      

Panel proposes capping Promise

It would no longer cover full tuition, fees at some schools

CHARLESTON — West Virginia should cap the Promise Scholarship’s yearly payout at $4,500 a student, according to a committee charged with examining the state’s college scholarship for top high school students.

The cap would help the state control costs associated with the program. But it would also mean the Promise no longer covers full tuition and fees at some state colleges, including WVU and Marshall. About 9,000 college students currently receive the scholarship.

The committee also rejected adding any mandatory in-state work requirement, like the one proposed and then withdrawn earlier this year by Gov. Joe Manchin.

The draft report from the Promise Scholarship Ad-Hoc Advisory Committee represents a complete review of the 6-year old program.

Jerry Beasley, the former president of Concord University, led the group. He declined to comment on the specifics of the report, which the committee is set to present a final draft of in January.

“The important thing is that the people in the pipeline right now are not affected,” said state Sen. Ron Stollings, D-Boone, a member of the committee and chairman of the Senate’s higher education subcommittee. “That’s the intention of the work group — that any changes made affect new Promise Scholarship people.”

Stollings also said that the Legislature continues to be passionate about funding need-based scholarships for students from low-income families as well as merit-based scholarships like the Promise.

The report found that the greatest impact of requiring students to pay back the Promise if they left the state after graduation would likely be on lower-income students, including many first generation college students.

“These students and families may be particularly concerned about the possibility of a financial aid award later becoming a loan,” the report says. “This could result in fewer academically prepared West Virginia students choosing to attend college or choosing to enroll in less expensive programs because of the concerns about incurring or increasing student loan obligations.”

In deciding to endorse caps to the Promise, the committee weighed a variety of options to cut costs, including raising requirements, as officials have done before.

The committee also found that more low-income students would be excluded if academic requirements were raised again. Research has found that Promise scholars are increasingly from higher-income families.

“With these consequences in mind, the advisory committee does not believe standards should continually be raised in order to balance the books at the expense of West Virginia’s most financially needy students,” the report said.

Instead, the committee found the best way to control costs is putting the $4,500 cap on the scholarship.

“Although a program that pays for all tuition and fees may appear ideal,” to continue doing so makes it more difficult to control costs and leaves less money available for need-based aid and campus infrastructure development, the report said.

If it goes with the cap, the state may be counting on federal dollars to step in and make up some of the loss. The committee thinks federal education tax credits will not only help ease the cap’s effect on families but “in effect, increase the amount of federal dollars coming into the state.”

Students should also be encouraged — but not required — to participate in volunteer work.

Though Promise scholars are told they should do community service, the committee says that little has been done to promote volunteering.

The committee found that firm requirements would increase the administrative costs to both the state and colleges.

“While lip-service to a community service requirement might not be very expensive to administer, ensuring quality experiences for students would be quite costly,” the draft reads.

Instead the committee recommends that students be made to a sign a pledge making the scholarship a “moral obligation” award that urges some form of “payback” to the state. Additionally, the state should find some way to recognize scholars to encourage volunteerism.

The scholarship costs the state about $10 million per graduating class — or more than $40 million a year total — but that cost has been steadily rising even as the number of scholars it pays tuition for shrinks because of a decline in the number of high school graduates and higher eligibility standards.

The increase comes from the continuously rising tuition prices and an increase in the number of Promise scholars who choose to attend public four-year colleges.

By choosing to attend four-year universities like WVU, which increases its tuition every year, students are moving away from cheaper two-year colleges. The shift also increases expenses by lowering the number of students at private colleges, which the state already caps pay outs for at $4,300 a year.

The same goes for attendance at Marshall, where a declining number of Promise scholars have chosen to go. Instead, students are attending WVU, the four-year public college with the highest tuition in the state.

The committee surveyed the field and found other successes and failures in the scholarship.

Compared to similar students prior to the implementation of the scholarship, Promise recipients have higher GPAs, complete more credits overall in college, and are more likely to take 30 credits per year, according to a study cited in the report. They have higher four-year graduation rates.

But the scholarship only “modestly increased” the college going rate. And the number of low-income students in the state has actually fallen by more 2 percent this decade. This is part of a national trend, but the drop has been sharper in West Virginia.

In a separate report, a majority of high school seniors said they would still accept West Virginia’s Promise Scholarship even if it required them to work in the state for a year after college, according to a survey by the state Higher Education Policy Commission.

The poll, conducted this spring but just released, found that 62 percent of 2008 Promise-eligible graduates would have accepted changes to the scholarship similar to those proposed by Manchin.