With a regulatory change the U.S. Department of Education quietly placed into effect in May 2003, students nationwide could lose millions of dollars in tuition assistance beginning in the 2004—05 school year.

These changes will reduce the Pell Grant program, the nation’s primary source of scholarship awards for low-income students, by $270 million for next year.

DOE officials have estimated that 84,000 college students nationwide will completely lose their eligibility for federal financial aid under the new formula the department is using to determine a student’s financial need. Beside those who will be dropped from the program, hundreds of thousands of other students who currently qualify for grants may see their rewards reduced.

The process one must go through to receive financial aid is familiar to all students: To be eligible, a student must fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The DOE then applies a single formula to calculate the families’ expected financial contribution (EFC) to their child’s education. The EFC is then subtracted from the student’s college costs to decide their eligibility for federal Pell Grants and other types of aid.

But how the DOE-enacted changes affect students’ eligibility is less well-known. The formula the DOE uses to decide a student’s EFC includes income and assets as well as deductions for state and local taxes. When the DOE updated its tax figures in May (which it curiously hadn’t done since 1994), it used the Internal Revenue Service’s most current tax data, which dated back three years to 2000. Note that this was before the current economic slide that prompted many states to raise their taxes considerably.

This means that student EFCs are being figured with much smaller tax deductions than their families are actually paying out — students families’ income will now seem much larger on paper, hurting their Pell Grant eligibility.

In light of the current stint of huge tuition increases, this is the worst time for something like this to happen. For this school year, students coughed up extra money for a whopping 22.3 percent increase, including mandatory fees. The year before that, it was 18.5 percent. The Board of Regents will vote on next year’s tuition increase in November — another double-digit increase on top of these changes could hurt students greatly.

Like Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said in a Los Angeles Times article, “This is going to exclude a lot of young people who otherwise would qualify for the opportunity to get a college education.”

Students’ pockets have already been deeply gouged by the university, but now it seems the government is shaking students down by their ankles in order to grab their last few pennies.

Editorial Board:Nicole Paseka, Megan Hinds, Amy Schierbrock, Alicia Ebaugh