Win for student-parents

Like most college students, Bianca Rojas has a lot to balance—classes, papers, exams, research. Unlike most of her peers, though, the 25-year-old Cal State Long Beach sociology major also has two extracurricular obligations: Jasper and Adeline, her toddlers.

Each semester, she said, she carefully budgets her financial aid, calculating the credits she can afford, given the needs of her family. It’s stressful: Last semester, she and her partner, a student at Cal Poly Pomona, had to take turns skipping classes, if necessary, to tend the children.

“I had to seek counseling because I was just overwhelmed,” Rojas said. “It was a really difficult time because it was just not enough resources available. You find out too late, like, ‘Oh, there’s not going to be child care for you at this time.’ It’s like, then what do you do? Not go to school?”

Students such as Rojas were who Gov. Gavin Newsom had in mind this year when he injected millions of dollars into the state higher education budget to increase financial aid for young parents attending the University of California, California State University and the California Community Colleges.

More than 300,000 California students are supported by the state’s main financial aid program, known as Cal Grant; last year, about 32,000 of them also were parents. Newsom’s budget, among other things, increased awards to up $6,000 for UC, Cal State and community college students with children, promising “real relief to our parents who are getting an education at the same time.”

But high demand and administrative delays have slowed that relief, and made it clear that more work remains to improve state aid for so-called “nontraditional” students. Those students—who are completing degrees later in life as opposed to right after high school—have become a policy focus as California seeks to boost college graduation rates amid a projected shortfall by 2030 of 1.1 million bachelor’s-degree-holding workers.

Students with children “are increasingly becoming the norm,” said David O’Brien, director of government affairs for the California Student Aid Commission, which administers Cal Grants.

“It’s why the Student Aid Commission is at the forefront of an effort to modernize California financial aid to better serve the needs of the student of today as opposed to what was the traditional student of 30 or 40 years ago.”

So far this year, room for improvement has revealed itself in at least two areas of that effort. For one, the allocation of the additional grant money is structured in a way that still makes it hard for students with children to qualify. The state guarantees Cal Grants for eligible students attending college right out of high school, but aid for nontraditional students comes out of a more limited grant pool for which applicants must compete, and most students with children fall into that nontraditional group.

In the 2017-18 budget year, only 25,750 competitive grants were available for the more than 340,000 qualified applicants, according to a report by the California Budget and Policy Center. Newsom’s appropriation this year increased the number of competitive grants to 41,000, but the demand still exceeded 300,000—meaning the new money for nontraditional students is still comparatively hard to get.

The grant money for parents has also been delayed by procedural glitches, according to state officials.

“We hope to have the initial round of grants distributed by this November or December,” O’Brien said. “That’s just sort of a slight delay due to the rollout of the new program, the programming of the awards into our legacy system, which we’re in the process of upgrading.”

Students already have received their standard grant awards and if they qualify, they also will get the first portion of the increased access award when the Student Aid Commission rolls it out. After this semester, the awards will be disbursed along with the regular schedule of Cal Grants and other aid the commission administers, O’Brien said.

Rojas said that while it’s great that the money will be available to student-parents during the holidays, a time she says can be stressful financially, getting it earlier would have been even more beneficial.

“It could’ve been helpful if we had it from the beginning—that way people would feel a little bit more relaxed with how we are going to be able to budget to complete school,” Rojas said, noting that finances at the start of a semester often determine how many units a student takes.

“If there’s actually aid that could help you get through a whole semester full-time without having to work, that’s golden,” she said. “But if not, then you’re over here thinking ‘I’m going to take less units, so it’s going to delay graduation.’ It’s like a domino effect.”

Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive, nonpartisan think tank, seconds the need for more outreach. Last April, the foundation released a report recommending sweeping changes in the state’s financial aid system, including better communication and less complexity.

Shireman, whose focus is education policy, says the amount of assistance needs to be gradually ramped up, too, to about $2 billion per year in grant aid for low-income students.

“We are hoping and working to encourage a budget next year that has a much larger increase in investment in Cal Grants to address the gaps that we’re seeing,” he said. “First of low-income parents, but also other low income students as well.”