We can do more to get aid to the right students

Recently we wrote about the Rethinking Student Aid Study Group, which came out with a report suggesting student aid was not being made accessible enough to low-income students.

Now a new report from the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation suggests the same problem with our northern neighbor.

The report claimed that much of student aid is offered through tax credits from the federal and provincial governments, along with post-graduation tax rebates, which favor more affluent students.

It seems that some Canadian students now receive a better type of aid because more of it comes as non-repayable grants than as loans, which are more difficult for low-income students to cope with. In 2006-07, 30 percent of need-based student aid was provided as non-repayable grants or loan remission – double the figure of 15 years ago.

Using tax credits and tax rebates doesn’t help potential low-income students because they either don’t pay enough taxes to really benefit from the rebates or they don’t have access to consulting about how much of a rebate they qualify for.

Plenty of middle-class families struggle to afford college, and governments around the world should be working to help ease that burden. However, if the budget is tight, the money should definitely go to lower-income students first. Many middle-income students can afford to go to state schools or community colleges. The gap between going to a community college instead of the school you want to is smaller than the gap between wanting to go to college and not going at all.

The U.S. financial aid system has plenty of flaws that hit low-income students the hardest. Families below the poverty line are unlikely to have as much time to deal with an overly complicated FAFSA. They probably also can’t afford to wait until a few months before the first semester at college to know what kind of aid they will be getting.

Putting more money into grants and moving toward automatic eligibility for student financial aid will make the process better all over the world.