BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff
“Free Cash for College!”
Lured by that tantalizing promise, 1,209 Los Angeles high school
seniors converged on 50 high schools one Saturday last February
where 1,000 volunteers helped them fill out the all-important
FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form —
a complex questionnaire that is required to qualify for federal
as well as state financial aid.
Mayor James Hahn launched the Free Cash program to help students
in Los Angeles overcome a primary roadblock to college.
Helping the city find that solution was UCLA’s Thomas
Kane, professor of policy studies and economics and a national
expert on how college costs, tuition and financial aid policies
affect college enrollment rates. Kane, author of “The
Price of Admission: Rethinking how Americans Pay for College”
(Brookings Institution Press, 1999), was contacted last spring
by Deputy Mayor Joy Chen, who was searching for ideas on how
to boost college-going in the city, where under-education is
a major economic problem.
“There’s been an enormous amount of research on
the barriers to college that low-income students face. But his
[Kane’s] research is seminal on this subject,” said
Chen. “It really shaped our thinking about the barriers
holding young people back from college. His research is extraordinarily
influential among public policy makers.”
Using city resources to help students and their families leverage
state and federal financial aid, Kane told Chen, was a wise
investment.
While an associate professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy
School of Government, Kane and a colleague created the Coach
program to provide students at three inner-city Boston high
schools with the same level of college guidance offered at affluent
public and private high schools.
Filling out FAFSA “is like filling out a tax form or a
mortgage application,” said Kane, who serves on the city’s
“Free Cash” task force. “Nobody looks forward
to it.”
Chen said the program will be offered again next year. “It
was a really exciting project. It’s all about making an
investment in our economy.”
