© 2024 NPR Illinois
The Capital's Community & News Service
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Dusty Rhodes headshot
Education Desk
The Education Desk is our education blog focusing on key areas of news coverage important to the state and its improvement. Evidence of public policy performance and impact will be reported and analyzed. We encourage you to engage in commenting and discussing the coverage of education from pre-natal to Higher Ed.Dusty Rhodes curates this blog that will provide follow-up to full-length stories, links to other reports of interest, statistics, and conversations with you about the issues and stories.About - Additional Education Coverage00000179-2419-d250-a579-e41d385d0000

Senate Approves Aid For Low-Income College Students

Randy Dunn
Brian Mackey
/
WUIS
SIU President Randy Dunn says a significant share of students getting MAP grant assistance at SIU are from minority groups.

Among the casualties of the Illinois budget impasse are grants that help low-income students pay for college. On Wednesday, Democrats in the state Senate voted to address that.

Thousands of students take advantage of the so-called MAP grants to attend everything from community colleges to the U. of I.

Randy Dunn, the president of Southern Illinois University, says two-thirds of students at the Carbondale campus get help from the program.

"The average award for our students is significant," Dunn told a Senate committee. "This is not something that's chicken feed."

Dunn says SIU and other state schools will let students attend for the fall semester as though the MAP program had full funding. But he says if the state doesn't come through with a budget soon, the students will have to make up the missing tuition before they can register for the spring semester.

Republicans said that means the funding issue is not urgent, but Democrats were unpersuaded, passing the measure without any Republican votes.

"What we're going to end up doing is, quite frankly, pricing students who are just as academically intelligent as other students, we're going to price them out of the American dream," said Sen. Dan Kotowski, a Democrat from Park Ridge.

Although Gov. Bruce Rauner approved the state's K-12 education budget argued in court that state workers should get paid during the impasse, he now says he'd rather see a comprehensive budget deal than approve additional individual programs.

Brian Mackey formerly reported on state government and politics for NPR Illinois and a dozen other public radio stations across the state. Before that, he was A&E editor at The State Journal-Register and Statehouse bureau chief for the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.
Related Stories