Progress Illinois

Late last month, university officials went public with their appeal to state lawmakers and Gov. Pat Quinn to restore college aid through the Monetary Award Program (MAP). As regular readers know, 138,000 Illinois college students are currently in the lurch waiting to see if the need-based grants -- funding for which was cut by half this year -- will be restored before second semester begin in January. Considering that 75 percent of MAP recipients come from families making $40,000 or less a year, the loss could force thousands to drop out. That could cause big problems for colleges and universities, particularly private institutions, who could lose millions in tuition, loans, and scholarship money as a result. The Sun-Times explores the impact:

With few exceptions, schools will ask students to take more loans, work longer hours in outside jobs or find the money other ways. The hope is that some students will be able to stay enrolled.

But if students leave, "that from an institutional standpoint is a complete loss,'' [Dave Tretter, president of the Federation of Independent Illinois Colleges and Universities] said, particularly because many private schools rely on tuition for a larger share of their operating costs. "They are not going to be bringing their federal aid. They are not going to be bringing loan dollars. ... It wouldn't be a stretch to say that some schools will have a hard time making it.''

Once students quit school, the odds of re-enrollment are slim, a fact that could bruise Illinois colleges for years to come. Take Chicago State University, for example. More than half (58 percent) of its 3,000 students are MAP grant recipients. At the three University of Illinois campuses, upwards of 12,400 students were counting on $26.5 million in the grants this spring semester alone. Unlike private colleges -- who are struggling with tanking endowments and shrinking private donations -- state schools may be better equipped to weather the storm. But even at U of I, where efforts have been made for years to helped cover the gap between MAP grants and tuition, the rising cost of doing so -- from $1 million in 2002 to $35 million this year -- and a massive decline in state aid makes the proposition unsustainable. "We've been bleeding and bleeding and bleeding," U. of I.'s Vice President for Academic Affairs Mrinalini Rao told the Sun-Times. "We are scraping the bottom of the barrel.''

As we've pointed out before, there's plenty of blame to go around for how the cuts got this far. For students -- many of whom face a November 1 deadline for re-enrollment -- time for a solution is running short. All eyes will be on Springfield this week as lawmakers head back to the Capitol on Wednesday to come up with a solution.