Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The Drug-Free Student Aid provision was tacked on to the Higher Education Act of 1998 as part of Souder's aggressive anti-drug agenda. The law was intended to be both an incentive and punishment for currently enrolled students who were battling drug problems: Students who were receiving aid but had strayed from the straight and narrow would lose that money unless they could prove that they'd cleaned themselves up. "We wanted to ensure that students who were receiving taxpayer subsidizations were not breaking the law," explains Seth Becker, Souder's press secretary. The provision passed quickly, with support from both sides of Congress.
Under the rule, any student who has been convicted of the possession or sale of a controlled substance is temporarily -- or perhaps permanently, depending on the offense -- ineligible for any federal grants, loans or work assistance. Students with one drug possession conviction lose their aid for one year from the date of conviction; with two convictions, they lose two years; and upon a third offense they may lose their aid forever.
Sanctions are even stricter if students are caught selling drugs: A first offense is punished with a two-year aid loss, and a second conviction gets you indefinitely barred. There is one caveat: If a student completes a federally approved drug rehabilitation program, and then passes two unannounced drug tests, he or she could get the aid reinstated.
But in their rush to get the law on the books, Congress failed to conceive of a reasonable strategy to enforce the provision. The lack of an implementation procedure has resulted in far more students being affected by the law than anyone, even Souder, ever intended. This glitch is compounded further by the inherent unfairness of the law: It specifically targets minority students of lower income, and ignores any financial aid applicants who have committed crimes unrelated to drugs.
Even though the provision was intended to deny aid to currently enrolled students who are convicted of drugs, it has had the effect of punishing new students who have sinned in the past. What the law didn't take into consideration is that the Department of Education has no way of knowing when recipients of financial aid get in trouble with the law. Indeed, college financial aid officers have no means of tracking the arrests and convictions of their students.
Under the circumstances, applicants for aid are required to self-report their past drug convictions when they sign up for support for the first time. The outcome of this system is that the only students who can be identified as having drug convictions are new applicants who haven't even begun to receive aid (and who also haven't been savvy enough to lie about their drug histories when filling out their application).
Both opponents and proponents of the provision agree that this is an unfair way to ferret out drug offenders; because of the way the law is being used, it is no more than a belated punishment for crimes that happened long before the student applied for college. But the sides disagree on how many students have lost their aid because of it.
The Department of Education's numbers fail to clearly illustrate the impact of this provision. It's possible, in the strictest sense, to say that only 1,019 students have lost their aid since 1991 because of a past drug conviction. But this ignores thousands more students who are dropping out of the financial aid process halfway through, thanks to the way the application is formatted. Since 1991, some 59,543 students have either left the question about drug convictions blank on their applications or failed to return worksheets that grilled them about their drug convictions, thereby making them ineligible.
No one is tracking these students to find out why they gave up, but it's probably a fair assumption that many of them had drug convictions they didn't want to reveal and so simply decided not to bother. Similarly, no one is tracking what happens to students who are denied financial aid: Do they continue on to college anyway, find other forms of financial aid and take on second jobs? Or do they just drop out altogether?
There is no national data on these questions, but an informal survey of some local colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area unearthed some disturbing trends. At San Francisco State University, for example, 48 students were turned down for financial aid last year because of their prior drug convictions; of those 48, says financial aid director Hubler, only 4 students ultimately enrolled in school. At City College of San Francisco, 10 students were turned down; a slight majority continued on to school and the rest disappeared. (The more prestigious University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University didn't recall any students who had been denied financial aid.)
"One could theorize from the numbers that students are being denied aid and then not enrolling," says Hubler. "And another group of students with convictions surely looked at the application and said, 'I'm not even going to apply for financial aid.' We have no idea how many of those students there are."
