Un-kool aid

If you read the front page today you know that around 400 needy IU students will receive $1,000 less aid than they'd been told to expect. See, the State Student Assistance Commission of Indiana told IU officials that its need-based Frank O'Bannon grants could be worth $6,756 per student -- which is what IU told students' families. But, then, last week, the state decided that the maximum amount for O'Bannon grants will only be $5,692. Thus, IU students receiving the maximum amount of aid might still have to pay $1,768 rather than $704. It remains to be seen whether the University will make up the difference out of its own funds (our preferred solution), or leave things as they are.\nSigh. Here at Camp Editorial Board, it sure feels like we've heard this song before. Why does the State of Indiana have so much trouble when it comes to supporting students' access to higher \neducation? \nIn the aforementioned article, state officials provided several mealy-mouthed excuses for why the grants will be lower than expected: more students qualified for them, decisions made by the federal government affected it (somehow), and that the state legislature had told them not to "expect big funding increases." Of these justifications, the first two border on nonsense. Regarding the former, if the state was serious about access to higher education, a larger number of qualifying students would translate into budget reallocations. Regarding the latter, while it must be nice to get a hand-out from the bloated federal bureaucracy, need we remind the Hoosier state of the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? That is, "(t)he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In other words, education is not really the domain of the federal government. Or, perhaps, we should remind them of Article 8, Section 1 of the Indiana Constitution: "Knowledge and learning, generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government, it should be the duty of the General Assembly to encourage, by all suitable means, moral, intellectual scientific, and agricultural improvement; and provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all." Since we are not legal scholars, we couldn't tell you whether Article 8.1 has been interpreted to only apply to primary and secondary education, but this nickel-and-diming of the post-secondary level certainly seems to run counter to the text's spirit.\nThe third justification -- that the legislature isn't willing to raise the funds -- is more telling. In its 2004 report on Indiana's system, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education awarded the state a "D" for affordability, noting that "Indiana has made no notable progress in providing affordable higher education opportunities over the past decade." Sorry kid -- helping you afford college just ain't a priority.