Last week, when I AM NOT A LOAN raised our concernsabout UVa's decision to eliminate the no-loan provisionfrom AccessUVa, we received a lengthy response fromPresident Sullivan. We know others may have received thesame response, so we wanted to share our thoughts in theaccompanying slide show. It's disappointing that theUniversity is more concerned with justifying its actionsthan admitting it made a mistake and fixing it.

-Mary Nguyen Barry

UVa Class of 2010

FACT: Yes, more students are eligible for AccessUVa today than when the program began, and that's a success story. But, it's also why we need to continue the AccessUVA program as it existed until the University cut it this summer. We need the program to actually scale up, not back.

FACT: The Rector is right. UVa should not increase tuition to pay for continuing its grant aid promise to students from low-income families. Doing so would force more students to require financial aid, further driving up the cost of AccessUVa. Also, it would drive a wedge between higher and lower income students. Instead, UVa should secure the $6 million a year it proposes to cut in grant aid either from its existing $1.4 billion annual budget or new sources.2 Finding it should be possible. $6 million is barely one-half of one percent of UVa’sannual operating budget.

The choice to cut from the lowest-income students first does not reflect UVa's values or Thomas Jefferson's original vision. Grant aid for our neediest students should be a budget priority, not a budget casualty.

FACT: Although many institutions are not need-blind regarding admissions, many of UVa’s competitors are. For example, UNC-Chapel Hill, Georgetown, Duke, and William & Mary are all need-blind. A need-blind admissions policy, however, is meaningless if the university doesn’t offer its students enough aid to meet their need. UVa would be falsely admitting students, ultimately denying them by not giving them enough grant-based financial aid to afford the University.

FACT: While UVa may claim to meet 100% of need, what's different now is that they want to do so with loans. UVa would have students from the lowest income families borrow as much as $28,000 in new student loans to get a UVa degree. That’s not meeting need. Cutting grant aid and increasing student loan debt is the opposite of meeting need and would drive students away from the University.

FACT: UVa competitors like Cornell, Duke, Berkeley, and William & Mary all cap loan debt for middle and upper middle-income students as do some 50 other colleges of varying wealth. It’s surprising that UVa, the wealthiest public college in the nation, would choose to cut grant aid to students from the neediest families while boasting of maintaining a loan cap for students from middle-income families. The question that UVa must answer is why, if it had to cut somewhere, it chose to cut grant aid to students from the poorest families, who do not have a safety net like other students do.

FACT: The income-based repayment system (IBR) referenced is a federal system,

not UVa's. Moreover, most students who use that system have to pay more over

the course of repayment because IBR draws out the repayment schedule. The way

IBR works is that a student gets to make lower monthly payments, but over a

longer period of time with interest accruing during that time. It's like getting lower

minimum payments on your credit card — a good option to have in times of

distress, but in general not a long-term benefit.

FACT: It trivializes the financial burden low-income students face to compare the terms of a

federal student loan to a car loan, a loan that is not relevant for the vast majority of low-

income students. Requiring very low-income students to assume debt to better educate

themselves and move up the socioeconomic ladder is entirely different than individuals at

various life stages choosing to take out a loan for a consumption commodity — one that

most poor students do not take on.

FACT: Not all of UVa's endowment is restricted in its use. In fact, about one-third of the money that can be spent out of the endowment each year is unrestricted. Specifically, the University's website states: "The estimated distribution for fiscal year 2012-13 is about $138.9 million. About 32% is not donor-restricted.”

3

The University also has a history of funding its priorities when dollars get tight (much tighter than they are now). When the State cut the University's budget by $20 million in 2007-08, the University managed to move money around to ensure that neither faculty nor AccessUVa were harmed.

4And, the University accomplished that with a much smaller endowment than it has

today.5

FACT: That’s right, AccessUVa is a worthy target of UVa's philanthropy and something on which the University should be focusing its fundraising efforts. But have you seen a fundraising appeal from UVa aimed at raising dollars for financial aid, or specifically to ensure that it could maintain grants to the neediest students? I haven't. I do recall other recent appeals, including one for the $3 billion capital campaign, some $12 million of which is financing UVa's new squash center.

FACT: The key phrase here is “students who come.” The proposed cut to AccessUVa threatens to make UVa unattainable to students from low-income families. UVa already ranks among the bottom 5% of four-year colleges in terms of low-income student enrollment. If UVa cuts the pre-existing grant-aid promise out of the AccessUVa program, it could fall even further behind its peers in access for low-income students. For student body diversity to be an honest goal for UVa, the University must make restoring the AccessUVa grant-aid promise to students from poor families a budget priority.

http://bit.ly/notanotherpenny

http://iamnotaloan.org/pages/accessuva-fact-sheet

Sources:

1AccessUVa Program Recommendation Presentation to the UVa Board of Visitors, Aug. 2, 2013, http://bit.ly/BOVppt

2Financing the University 101: The University’s Budgeted Sources of Funds, http://bit.ly/UVaBudget

3Financing the University 101: Questions and Answers-Endowment, http://bit.ly/Finance101FAQ

4 Q&A: The Impact of the State Budget Cuts on the University of Virginia, http://bit.ly/08UVaBudget

5University of Virginia Investment Management Company Annual Report June 2008, http://bit.ly/08UVIMCOreport