MSU officials will have a hard time awarding the $4,000 some students could receive from a new federal grant without more information on who qualifies, and now a new lawsuit could further complicate the process.
President Bush signed the Deficit Reduction Act on Feb. 8, putting SMART Grants on the table for college juniors and seniors majoring in science, math, engineering and some foreign languages. The exact majors and languages have not been determined.
To qualify for the grants, students also must be eligible to receive federal Pell Grants and maintain a 3.0 grade-point average. Pell Grants are awarded on a financial need basis.
"The Department of Education has not defined what they mean by science and math," said Rick Shipman, MSU's director of the Office of Financial Aid. "That criteria has not been provided."
Shipman said the lack of criteria would make it difficult to determine how many students at MSU could benefit from the program and finalize award letters to recipients.
He said between 1,200 and 2,000 students might be eligible to receive SMART Grants once the university determines which of its science and math majors qualify.
Shipman said technological majors such as chemical engineering, materials science and telecommunication, information studies and media made up some of the 56 majors named as "high-tech" by the university for the state government. The list did not include any of the math, science or language majors that could qualify for the new grants.
Shipman said a list of qualifying languages would probably be crafted by the U.S. Department of Defense and would likely contain Chinese and Middle Eastern languages.
He said communication from U.S. Department of Education officials indicated they hoped to have a "working list" to universities in the next few weeks.
"We don't have that long — we need to get these award letters out," Shipman said.
Andrea Becker, chief of staff for U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, said the program was geared to address the gap between the number of U.S. engineering graduates and those from overseas.
"Report after report are coming out saying China and India are very far ahead in hard science degrees," Becker said. "You don't get a lot of advances in medicine and technology without the hard sciences. We can't afford to lose that edge."
Becker said Frist was concerned there were not enough incentives for students to stay in the math and science fields. She said the feeling in Washington was that the U.S. needed to increase the number of students in these fields to stay competitive with the rest of the world.
But Alabama attorney Jim Zeigler has filed a lawsuit claiming the Deficit Reduction Act, which seeks to reduce the federal debt by cutting Medicaid programs and subsidies to student loan providers, is unconstitutional.
Zeigler claims it passed both houses of Congress without identical language — the House bill passed with language that gives Medicaid recipients on oxygen support coverage for 36 months, and the Senate bill says 13 months.
"This is a $2 billion difference," Zeigler said. "It is a life or death difference, not in the realm of a comma out of place. It's not a simple typo."
Becker said in an e-mail that Frist's position on the lawsuit is that the act is valid and the grants will be offered this fall.
Val Meyers, MSU's associate director of the Office of Financial Aid, said the office also is operating under that assumption, and still is assembling award letters as though the grants will come through.
"We would rather offer students the money and then have to come up with it from another source, than get the money later and have to take something else away from them," Meyers said.
