Several speakers at the NAFEO conference recently addressed the PLUS loan problem that caused many students to abandon their studies last fall. Check out some of their responses at Politic 365.
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“This is the worst situation I’ve seen in my 35 years as President,” said Dr. William Harvey, who has been the President of Hampton University in Virginia since 1978, yesterday in Washington DC. Dr. Harvey is the Chair of President Obama’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
“Some 14,000 HBCU students came to our campuses last year, learned that their Parent PLUS applications had been denied and were sent back home,” Harvey said during a speech at the annual National Association for Equal Opportunity conference (NAFEO) on April 15 in Washington D.C.
Harvey was referring to the problem that hit America’s historically Black colleges and universities disproportionately last fall after the Department of Education changed the way they interpreted ”credit worthiness” and “adverse credit history” for applicants for Parent PLUS loans. As a result, a spike of PLUS loan denials occurred as colleges prepared for the fall 2012 semester. Over 14,600 students at HBCUs were declined loans according to HBCU advocates and college Presidents. The five hardest hit HBCUs can be found here.
Harvey echoed what Stillman College President Dr. Ernest McNealey also told Politic365 this week. That is, that he could remember no other time when thousands of HBCU students had to leave their studies en masse as they did in the fall of 2012. Several HBCU Presidents stated they only discovered the problem after they noticed a decline in enrollment in August 2012 and began contacting each other.
“The approval rate at Tuskegee University for Parent PLUS loans plummeted from 55% last year to 23% this year,” Tuskegee President Dr. Gilbert Rochon told Politic365 yesterday. “The only way we were able to stay ‘evenboard’ with that debacle was to disgorge half a million dollars from our base budget into Perkins Loans,” Rochon added. “But that’s not a sustainable situation,” he concluded.
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