California education news: What’s the latest?
The more than 300,000 recipients of California’s Middle Class Scholarship will likely receive their full award amounts this school year despite the program being on track to exceed its budget by a worrisome $103 million, state financial aid officials said Thursday.
The California Student Aid Commission, which administers the Middle Class Scholarship as well the Cal Grant, previously informed the Legislature that expenditures for the middle class award could be short $103 million, exceeding the program’s $925 million budget. That’s because more University of California and California State University students were eligible for awards than was initially estimated. The commission first thought 250,000 would be eligible for the awards in the 2024-25 school year, later revising that up to 312,000 students. But this fall, it turned out that about 350,000 students were eligible.
To remedy the gap in the short term, and avoid further delays, the plan detailed Thursday is for UC campuses on the quarter calendar to use institutional aid to get students the full amount they were promised, said Jake Brymner, the commission’s deputy director for public policy and affairs. Those campuses would then get reimbursed through the state’s 2025-26 budget process, according to the commission and legislative staff. Students at Cal State and semester-based UC campuses would receive their scholarships via the normal allocation process, Brymner added.
The award amounts vary, but the maximum for 2024-25 is 35% of the total cost of attendance at the institution attended by the recipient. The average award amount in 2023-24 was $3,010 at CSU and $2,623 at UC.
“This was all done in the service of avoiding that requirement to have to pull dollars back from students that had already been notified that they’d be awarded,” Brymner said, explaining the temporary solution. He said the plan was crafted with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Department of Finance and legislative leaders.
The Middle Class Scholarship is available to undergraduates whose family’s income and some assets are as high as $226,000 in 2024-25. The scholarship covers a portion of a student’s costs of attendance using a formula that takes into account how much money the Legislature appropriates to fund the program each year, how many students are eligible for the scholarship and other sources of money a student has on hand to pay for college.
Legislative Analyst’s Office research shows that more than half of students receiving Middle Class Scholarships awards in 2022-23 were in a household earning $50,000 or less, with 80% having a household income of $100,000 or less.
Earlier Thursday, the leaders of three California education nonprofits expressed concern about a proposal to reallocate money from the Cal Grant program to cover the gap. Brymner, though, said Thursday that any dollars appropriated for the Cal Grant that aren’t used would revert to the state’s general fund.
EdSource staff writer Amy DiPierro contributed to this article.
—Michael Burke
