Emilio's retirement gift, an OSU football jersey; number 35 for 35 years, of course!

We’ll miss you, EV! Enjoy retirement!!

-jm

Does it make sense for incoming freshmen to take out more than $5,000 in Parent Direct Loan with high interest to come to college without the support of Perkin Loan and Institutional Based Aid?

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I don’t have much in the way of facts, except what I’ve observed with individual awards.
I’m comparing awards for freshmen during 2007-08 with incoming freshmen for 2008-09…

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So what’s missing? The combined total in Supplemental Tuition Grants and Supplemental
Educational Opportunity Grants of $2100. Where did these grants go? That’s the
pertinent question to ask.

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Here’s one possibility I’ve been speculating on: a student is eligible for a $400 Pell
Grant and no Oregon Opporunity Grant, which means they need an additional $5723 in OSU
based grants to cover tuition and fees. Is that where it all went? It’s possible.
Which essentially means they’ve sacrificed the very high need students, students whose
family income is under $25,000, to the students whose eligibility for Pell is borderline.

Because of the length of the comment, I had to parse it into highlights. You can read the rest of his comment and analysis below the original post.

In order to be as precise as possible I asked Director of Financial Aid and Scholarships, Emilio Vejil, to write the response:

The financial aid application process is a yearly application process and there are many factors that impact a student’s award from year to year. The funding for the various aid programs varies from year to year, the application pool and need levels change, the priority application date may be missed by students, family financial circumstamces change and the awards are never guaranteed from year to year.

The Bridge to Success program allows Oregon residents who are both Pell and Oregon Opportunity Grant eligible to have their basic tuition and fees paid for if these two two programs do not cover this cost. In addition, students who continue to meet the academic and need provisions of the program will continue to receive this tuition funding from year to year.

This program was created to allow more high need students to be assisted with grant assistance to meet their tuition cost since our grant funding is limited. The same amount of campus based funds are being distributed to needy students with an increase in institutional funds allowing more grant funds to assist a larger student population over their undergraduate course of study.

Thanks for your comment, Chamroeun. I hope this clears up some of the confusion for you.

-jm