The 2010 MASFAA Conference kicked off on Wednesday, November 3 with an enthusiastic welcome from MASFAA president, Christine McGuire of Boston University. She expressed that the theme of the conference would be to look at innovative ways to serve students. Jennifer Douglas of the Department of Education was the first of three general session speakers. She spoke of the importance of increasing the ease of access to the FAFSA and other federal resources, particularly for students that don’t fit into a traditional paradigm. The second general session speaker, Dr. Ross Peterson-Veatch of Goshen College, discussed the work he has done studying the varying experiences of minority students at his school. In the third and final general session of conference, Jeff Baker of the Department of Education provided the annual federal update.
In the same format as in prior conferences, there were a number of concurrent sessions in which smaller audiences were afforded the opportunity to interact with the presenters. Some highlights of these sessions included:
Tools to Refuel: Reference and Research Tools
Allene Begley Curto of Springfield College provided a well-researched list of places where Financial Aid Administrators can keep in touch with rules and regulations as well as with the constant changes in the industry. Some publications that should be on every administrator’s bookshelf are: FSA Handbook, Application and Verification Guide (AVG), SAR/IRIS Guide, Policy and Procedure Manual, IRS Publication 17, and EdPubs. Here are some websites that administrators should bookmark and visit often: ifap.ed.gov, www.nslds.ed.gov, www.studentloans.gov, www.nasfaa.org, www.nasfaa.org, www.masfaa.org, and www.finaid.org. Some good sources of news updates are Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Education, IFAP weekly digest, and NASFAA News. The presentation was very thorough, and the tools which she provided can assist any financial aid professional.
College Access: Working with Undocumented Students
Eva Mirona of MIRA Coalition presented information on recently passed federal regulation including “The Dream Act,” which provides resources to undocumented students who arrived in the US prior to the age of 16, have lived here for five year, and have a G.E.D or equivalent. She also discussed “The Education Equality Act” which has been a hot button topic in the State House this year. The approval of the legislation would allow Massachusetts students without permanent residency status to pay the same in-state tuition rates as their peers at public colleges. The presentation received high marks for the expertise of the presenter as well as for her presentation skills.
FM: Is it Broken?
Heather McDonnell of Sarah Lawrence College gave a thought-provoking presentation about her perceived shortcomings of Federal Methodology. She provided a brief history of federal aid and explained the three factors cause FM to be flawed: 1) The federal government feels compelled to control expenditures of the Pell Grant program, 2) political expediency and specifically pork-barrel legislation, and 3) FM lacks the collaboration of practitioners and economists. She then gave many examples of FM failing to serve her own students and suggested that the administrators reconsider their reliance on FM, at least as it pertains to the distribution of institutional funding. Lastly, she emphasized that FM is far from infallible, and she encouraged administrators to question FM in cases in which it fails to portray an accurate snapshot.
Information about all sessions can be found at the following webpage: http://masfaa.com/events/conference/conference2010/documents.php. |
