Unlike many schools, the University of Tennessee gives excess financial aid each semester to students who academically qualify for such gifts. Students who receive excess financial aid have generally worked extremely hard for those checks, and the university has successfully retained the state’s overachievers as in-state students enrolled at the flagship university.
Frankly, the state and university are wrong in giving so many students excess financial aid for any reason other than need. Too many students get checks for extra money that they rightfully earned under a faulty system.
The following is a real example of how excess financial aid is acquired. A student met the requirements for the academic merit HOPE Scholarship. This covered $2,500 worth of her tuition for the current term. The student qualified (by having above a 3.75 high school GPA and 29 ACT score) for the university’s highest guaranteed award, the Volunteer Scholarship, valued at $1,500 per semester, which was also credited towards her tuition. Her tuition was $2,963, and at the end of the semester, she received a check for $1,037. The university has no way to track where this money goes and no way to prove that it’s going toward school.
Excess aid might be a harmless reward if 4.0 students were few and far between, but there is no shortage of such students on campus. This academic school year beginning Fall 2007, one-third of freshmen entered with a high school GPA of 4.0 or better and an average ACT score of 26, easily qualifying for guaranteed state and university scholarships such as the HOPE and Volunteer awards. The university is spending money unnecessarily by handing it to students who really aren’t so “extraordinary” after all, if one of every three meet the academic criteria. In fact, according to the UT Financial Aid Office, roughly 10,000 students received excess financial aid this year, which amounts to nearly half of UT undergraduates.
The following is an approximated analysis of the incoming freshman class. If one-third of these students (One-fourth of the undergraduate population is roughly 5,500. One third of that is 1,833 students.) are receiving $1,037 of excess funds each semester, that totals to $1,900,821 in excess funds per semester just for Volunteer scholarship students in the freshman class, not including those freshmen that qualify for different university scholarships or the other 8,200 or so students receiving bonus checks.
The university must raise the bar on scholarship requirements, particularly the standardized test score minimum. Under the current system, there is no selectivity to any state or university guaranteed scholarship. Adding aspects such as difficulty of coursework or extracurricular involvement to the guaranteed scholarship consideration process would give high school students more incentive to work for their scholarships. This would save excess aid money, greatly elevate the university’s prestige, and continue to add a higher quality of student to this campus.
There is an argument the university must somehow lure (with cash) the best and brightest to stay in-state. Instead, the university could be spending all of the extra money paid to these thousands of students on improving some of the eyesores on campus or dysfunctional equipment still in use.
For example, as president of the North Carrick Residence Hall last fall, I, along with every other resident, suffered from the outdated and malfunctioning elevators. At one point, both elevators were broken for two days. That meant 48 hours of climbing up and down 12 flights of stairs each time I went to class or wanted to eat. The hall director informed me that the cost to replace an elevator was nearly $1 million and that the university didn’t have that kind of money.
The university has the money. It’s just being spent the wrong way through thousands of excess aid checks. Granted, 37 percent of the university’s allotted money used for scholarships comes from private endowments that go towards the donor’s preference. The other 63 percent (from funds such as student tuition and fees or government-issued money) should be budgeted by the state to UT for purposes other than cash handouts.
The administration brags about the statistics of the incoming classes getting better and better each year. But what is this policy really doing for students? Excess money is going into students’ pockets instead of being spent elsewhere within the university. The fact is there’s no way to track or prove that all of this money is going toward a student’s educational costs. Attracting some of the state’s top students is part of enhancing the UT academic experience, but a better way to do so might be to improve sub-par classrooms, purchase updated equipment, and continue to beautify the campus.
Bribing the best and brightest with cash each semester to attend UT is not going to bump the university to top-tier status as the administration desires. If the university wants to be among the best, it must advocate the reallocation of these excess financial aid funds to upgrade academic facilities, hire competitive professors, and clean up the campus so that the best students in Tennessee will actually want to stay in-state and come to Knoxville. With time, the university will appeal to the most qualified students: in-state and out.
— Oliver Casey is a sophomore in enterprise management. He can be reached at [email protected].
