Help Protect Cal Grants for Community College Students
We recently released a report exposing how Gov. Schwarzenegger's proposed state budget would drastically cut grant aid for low-income, high-achieving students. The proposal eliminates new Cal Grant awards for 45 percent of community college students who would have received them, along with five percent of would-be recipients at the University of California and 10 percent in the California State University system. Of the 22,500 grants that would be eliminated, 73 percent would have gone to CCC students.
The students who stand to lose their grants have lower incomes and higher GPAs than other Cal Grant recipients. They are more likely to be in the workforce and going back to school to improve their skills, job prospects, and earnings. The Cal Grants they receive provide a lot of bang for the state's buck: the average grant is smallest for community college students, but even a small grant can make a big difference for students struggling to cover the high cost of housing, textbooks, and transportation to school.
Especially in a time of economic instability, this low-cost, high-impact grant program should not be eliminated.
Please speak out to help save these grants! Take a moment to tell your state senator and assembly member that the budget should not be balanced on the backs of hard-working community college students.
Learn more about the impact of these cuts in our report, and from a column that ran yesterday in the Los Angeles Times. Also, check out our new list of how many students would lose grants at every community college in the state. It shows exactly how the proposed cuts will affect your community.
(Sent to the Institute's California mailing list only on April 7, 2008.)
