CHANGE AGENT #2 -- GRADUATE & PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS PERSPECTIVES

by Judith Cramer, VCU Medical School

The 2003 NASFAA Graduate Professional Issues Committee held its Fall meeting on the 28th and 29th of September, in Washington DC. Protesters were arrested outside the World Bank meeting just a few blocks away, while our committee reviewed our Reauthorization needs, planned for the 2003 Survey of Graduate Aid Policies, Practices and Procedures (SOGAPP), agreed on the need to reach out to regional and state associations and developed conference sessions targeted to the special needs of the graduate/ professional aid community.  

If you are an aid administrator who primarily serves an undergraduate population, you may have never thought about the ways graduate and professional schools differ from undergraduate programs. Class size, teaching methodologies and teacher/student ratios are just some examples of the differences that can be expected. Likewise, the concerns of a graduate/ professional aid administrator have a different focus. We have all the obligations related to the application approval process; our differences begin with packaging -- we have no Pell, we have no SEOG, many of us have no institutional money, and many of us work with funding programs that require significant additional documentation to determine student eligibility. As aid administrators, we understand economic realities mean that our students will be supported through the self-help and service programs and though the beneficence of extended families and supporting industries.

Our committee identified many goals for reauthorization and sharing some of these may be the best way to explain the differences between undergraduate and graduate aid. For example, we want to see an increase in the annual and aggregate limits for both Perkins and Stafford loans primarily because the limits should keep pace with costs but just as importantly, because our students often have no other source of funding.  Our medical residents and interns need the reinstatement and expansion of previously eliminated loan deferment categories.  They have a high lifetime potential as wage earners, but they leave school with average debts exceeding $100,000, and they enter into 4 to 7 year training programs earning a yearly salary under $40,000. We want to see increased parity in funding of campus-based programs so we can be certain that Perkins loans will be available for all students.  We also support the redesign of NSLDS so that we can advise our students properly with accurate consolidation data, and we strongly support the inclusion of the Title VII Aid programs that fund our health professions students.

Complete information regarding the administration of graduate and professional aid programs will be collected when SOGAPP is done in the upcoming year.  Last administered in 1997-98, the survey results provide a template for operations, packaging, and management of graduate and professional programs.  In order for the survey update to succeed, our committee determined that we must identify the community of aid administrators who serve the graduate professional populations.  Several regions have committees or interest groups, but we are hoping that we can get others established in this next year.

Our final activity of the weekend was brainstorming conference session proposals for NASFAA 2003.  We believe these topics will not only serve the training needs of graduate and professional school aid officers, but will also be of interest to every member of our profession.  Our suggestions include Ethics, Debt Management, Reauthorization, the Health and Human Services program and many more.  These are good topics for the state and regional level conferences and we hope they will be of interest to you.

The committee will meet several more times, in person and by teleconference, during the remainder of this academic year. If you have questions, concerns, comments or ideas that you would like me to bring to the committee, please email me at jmcramer@vcu.edu. 

GPIC Committee

Front Row: Ruth Strum, Rich Woodland (Chair), Linda Woodley, Pamela Nyiri

Back Row: Judy Cramer, Julie Berg-Mattson, Tim Lehman, Joy Thrush, John View (Commissioner)