In the face of higher education's ever-increasing price tag, AccessUVa, the University's undergraduate financial aid program, may expand to accommodate the future student body.
According to Student Financial Services Director Yvonne Hubbard, an expansion could help the program better accomplish two of its most important goals: "socio-economic diversity and ensuring that students from all walks of life are involved in life at the University and all the educational opportunities it affords."
While Hubbard said that the University has one of the "premier public financial aid programs in the country," she also noted that "there are still places for us to go."
Recently, Harvard, Princeton and Yale Universities have made changes to their financial aid programs, focusing more on moderate-income families as opposed to just low-income families, leading the "Board of Visitors to ask what we want to do," she noted.
Currently, AccessUVa has four components, which Hubbard and other members of the administration hope to improve. These include meeting the needs of all students who apply and have need, addressing the needs of students with family incomes equal to or lower than twice the poverty line, having a loan cap to ensure a student does not need to take out more in loans than the cost of in-state tuition from his first year at the University, and improving financial literacy among all students. The University provides free classes open to all students about money management, credit scores and planning mortgages and retirement, Hubbard said.
Plans to improve these four statutes of financial policy have yet to materialize, but Hubbard emphasized her confidence in the University's abilities to meet students' needs.
Josh Mitchell, president of Hoos for Open Access, a contracted independent organization dedicated to promoting socioeconomic diversity at the University and working closely with AccessUVa, said that "for people that are under [AccessUVa], it's a life-changing institution. It allows people to come to one of the most prestigious universities in the nation ... it makes you feel like you are valued as a person, as a student and as a scholar, because there's an institution out there that's willing to make an investment in you."
Kim Diaz, a member of the executive board of Hoos for Open Access, noted that the "main goal is to switch AccessUVa from an institutional focus to a student focus. AccessUVa gets a student here, but then they are stranded."
Hoos for Open Access has met with President John T. Casteen, III and various administrators to talk about improving AccessUVa, and Hubbard noted that the University "was pleased to see the organization start because they bring an energy and a fresh look" to the situation.
Though AccessUVa is trying to become more like Harvard, Princeton and Yale's programs by giving more grants and fewer loans, Hubbard noted this is difficult because the University does not have as many funds as these universities; beyond the monetary gap, those universities have a smaller student body to provide for than the University has.
"The Board of Visitors is interested in staying focused on all students and seeing if we can improve how many students are getting grants instead of work-study packages," she said.
Increasing socioeconomic diversity is important for the University as a whole, Mitchell explained, because "every group of people has a unique perspective on life ... including all kinds of diverse groups of people, and engaging in daily dialogue and discussion is important. Students of lower economic backgrounds need to be included in this dialogue to broaden everyone's view on society and life."
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