Last week, when I AM NOT A LOAN raised our concerns about UVa's decision to eliminate the no-loan provision from AccessUVa, we received a lengthy response from President Sullivan. We know others may have received the same response, so we wanted to share our thoughts in the accompanying slide show. It's disappointing that the University is more concerned with justifying its actions than admitting it made a mistake and fixing it.

1. Last week, when I AM NOT A LOAN raised our concerns
about UVa's decision to eliminate the no-loan provision
from AccessUVa, we received a lengthy response from
President Sullivan. We know others may have received the
same response, so we wanted to share our thoughts in the
accompanying slide show. It's disappointing that the
University is more concerned with justifying its actions
than admitting it made a mistake and fixing it.
-Mary Nguyen Barry
UVa Class of 2010

2. FACT: Yes, more students are eligible for AccessUVa today than when the
program began, and that's a success story. But, it's also why we need to
continue the AccessUVA program as it existed until the University cut it
this summer. We need the program to actually scale up, not back.

3. FACT: The Rector is right. UVa should not increase tuition to pay for continuing its grant aid
promise to students from low-income families. Doing so would force more students to
require financial aid, further driving up the cost of AccessUVa. Also, it would drive a wedge
between higher and lower income students. Instead, UVa should secure the $6 million a
year it proposes to cut in grant aid either from its existing $1.4 billion annual budget or new
sources.2 Finding it should be possible. $6 million is barely one-half of one percent of UVa’s
annual operating budget.
The choice to cut from the lowest-income students first does not reflect UVa's values or
Thomas Jefferson's original vision. Grant aid for our neediest students should be a budget
priority, not a budget casualty.

4. FACT: Although many institutions are not need-blind regarding
admissions, many of UVa’s competitors are. For example, UNC-Chapel
Hill, Georgetown, Duke, and William & Mary are all need-blind. A needblind admissions policy, however, is meaningless if the university doesn’t
offer its students enough aid to meet their need. UVa would be falsely
admitting students, ultimately denying them by not giving them enough
grant-based financial aid to afford the University.

5. FACT: While UVa may claim to meet 100% of need, what's different now
is that they want to do so with loans. UVa would have students from the
lowest income families borrow as much as $28,000 in new student loans
to get a UVa degree. That’s not meeting need. Cutting grant aid and
increasing student loan debt is the opposite of meeting need and would
drive students away from the University.

6. FACT: UVa competitors like Cornell, Duke, Berkeley, and William & Mary all
cap loan debt for middle and upper middle-income students as do some 50
other colleges of varying wealth. It’s surprising that UVa, the wealthiest
public college in the nation, would choose to cut grant aid to students from
the neediest families while boasting of maintaining a loan cap for students
from middle-income families. The question that UVa must answer is why, if
it had to cut somewhere, it chose to cut grant aid to students from the
poorest families, who do not have a safety net like other students do.

7. FACT: The income-based repayment system (IBR) referenced is a federal system,
not UVa's. Moreover, most students who use that system have to pay more over
the course of repayment because IBR draws out the repayment schedule. The way
IBR works is that a student gets to make lower monthly payments, but over a
longer period of time with interest accruing during that time. It's like getting lower
minimum payments on your credit card — a good option to have in times of
distress, but in general not a long-term benefit.

8. FACT: It trivializes the financial burden low-income students face to compare the terms of a
federal student loan to a car loan, a loan that is not relevant for the vast majority of lowincome students. Requiring very low-income students to assume debt to better educate
themselves and move up the socioeconomic ladder is entirely different than individuals at
various life stages choosing to take out a loan for a consumption commodity — one that
most poor students do not take on.

9. FACT: Not all of UVa's endowment is restricted in its use. In fact, about one-third of the money
that can be spent out of the endowment each year is unrestricted. Specifically, the University's
website states: "The estimated distribution for fiscal year 2012-13 is about $138.9 million.
3
About 32% is not donor-restricted.”
The University also has a history of funding its priorities when dollars get tight (much tighter
than they are now). When the State cut the University's budget by $20 million in 2007-08, the
University managed to move money around to ensure that neither faculty nor AccessUVa were
4
harmed. And, the University accomplished that with a much smaller endowment than it has
5
today.

10. FACT: That’s right, AccessUVa is a worthy target of UVa's philanthropy and
something on which the University should be focusing its fundraising efforts. But
have you seen a fundraising appeal from UVa aimed at raising dollars for
financial aid, or specifically to ensure that it could maintain grants to the
neediest students? I haven't. I do recall other recent appeals, including one for
the $3 billion capital campaign, some $12 million of which is financing UVa's new
squash center.

11. FACT: The key phrase here is “students who come.” The proposed cut to
AccessUVa threatens to make UVa unattainable to students from low-income
families. UVa already ranks among the bottom 5% of four-year colleges in
terms of low-income student enrollment. If UVa cuts the pre-existing grant-aid
promise out of the AccessUVa program, it could fall even further behind its
peers in access for low-income students. For student body diversity to be an
honest goal for UVa, the University must make restoring the AccessUVa grantaid promise to students from poor families a budget priority.

12. http://bit.ly/notanotherpenny
http://iamnotaloan.org/pages/accessuva-fact-sheet

13. Sources:
1AccessUVa
Program Recommendation Presentation to the
UVa Board of Visitors, Aug. 2, 2013, http://bit.ly/BOVppt
2Financing
the University 101: The University’s Budgeted
Sources of Funds, http://bit.ly/UVaBudget
3Financing
the University 101: Questions and AnswersEndowment, http://bit.ly/Finance101FAQ
4 Q&A:
The Impact of the State Budget Cuts on the University
of Virginia, http://bit.ly/08UVaBudget
5University
of Virginia Investment Management Company
Annual Report June 2008, http://bit.ly/08UVIMCOreport