Ca$h for College

This month, high school seniors will begin their final semester of school. As these students eagerly prepare to graduate and look ahead to college, they will face a most daunting challenge. How will they pay for a college education? How students and their families meet this challenge will determine whether or not they attend college.

Given the rising cost of college, eighty-two percent of college applicants and their parents polled in the Princeton Review’s 2014 “College Hopes & Worries Survey” estimated that the cost of college would be more than $75,000 and eighty-nine percent indicated that as a result, financial aid will be “extremely” necessary to pay for college.

While the federal government provides almost $150 billion a year to help students pay for college, thousands of students don’t go to college simply because they believe that they can’t afford it.

As part of her Reach Higher initiative, this year First Lady Michelle Obama is calling on every high school senior in America to complete their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or California Dream Act Application (for undocumented students) in order to receive federal and state financial aid and for students, principals, teachers, school counselors, and administrators to show how their school is taking action to get more students to fill out their forms.

First Lady Michelle Obama is challenging people in every college community– from student groups to admissions officers to college presidents – to take new steps to open up their campus to students who don’t always see themselves attending college. By placing high school students on a college campus, and exposing them to the college experience, students will be able to visualize their own college possibilities.

In West Contra Costa County, for the past three years the Ed Fund, West Contra Costa County’s Public Education Fund at www.edfundwest.org, has coordinated a district-wide campaign with high school counselors, the East Bay Consortium, and the West County College Access Network to increase financial aid application completion. In 2012, only 33% of West Contra Costa Unified School District students completed these free applications by the March 2nd priority deadline. By 2014, the percentage of seniors filing their applications by the priority deadline had increased to 66% - a 33% gain!

In 2015, the Ed Fund’s goal is for all district students to have the opportunity to complete their financial aid application and for 75% of district students to submit their applications by the March 2nd priority deadline. Towards this goal, the Ed Fund and its partners are working on a three pronged approach in West Contra Costa County. Free Ca$h for College Workshops will be held in the West Contra Costa County high schools in January and February to assist seniors in completing their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or California Dream Act applications. This will be followed up by allocating time in each high school in February for those students who were not able to attend a workshop to complete their applications. Finally, upon completing their FAFSA/Dream Act application, each student will receive a Student Aid Report which will be reviewed to ensure that there are no errors.

The Ed Fund has taken the lead in working to standardize the financial aid process in West Contra Costa County to ensure that all students have equal access to completing their financial aid applications. Last year some 50,000 college-bound high school seniors in California filled out applications for state financial aid, but were disqualified because they failed to submit the required transcripts from their schools. The West Contra Costa Unified School District has adopted a policy to automatically submit all high school senior’s GPA Verification Forms electronically to the California Student Aid Commission so that every student will be considered for a Cal Grant upon completing their FAFSA/Dream Act applications. The real win is that an additional 300 families in West Contra Costa County received a Cal Grant of up to $12,192 annually to attend a University of California, a California State University, a California Community College, or to most California private colleges. The College Access Foundation of California calculated that this will result in students receiving an additional $4.5 million in aid over four years.

Based on the success of this model, a California law was passed in August of 2014 requiring all California school districts to follow suit. Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, said he was moved to co-author AB2160 after seeing data showing a correlation between high application completion rates for Cal Grants and schools that electronically sent data to the aid commission for all graduating students. A report released by the education think tank Ed Trust-West found 71 percent of 12th-graders in districts including San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles successfully completed Cal Grant applications when using electronic transcripts verification compared with 56 percent in districts that did not. For a full list of workshops throughout the Bay Area, visit http://www.calgrants.org/index.cfm?navId=16.