Tuition Blues

To ease them, Carter seeks aid

The memo from Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano to President Carter was urgent. "We must move quickly if we are to seize the initiative on this very hot issue," warned Califano. The issue: tuition aid for middle-income families with children in college, a form of relief that has become increasingly popular on Capitol Hill with campus costs accelerating at dizzying rates--up 77% from 1967 to 1976-- and voters appealing for help. With two different plans already under consideration by Congress, each offering aid in the form of direct tax credits, which Carter opposes, the President heeded Califano's counsel and jumped in last week with his own variant: a $1.5 billion Middle Income College Assistance Act.

Carter proposed an automatic $250-a-year grant for college students from families with an annual income of $16,000 to $25,000. Such grants, part of the federal Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG) program, had previously been limited to students from families that earned under $16,000 a year. The increased aid, according to Administration estimates, would cost $700 million.

Additionally, Carter's package calls for expansion of the Guaranteed Student Loan program, under which the Federal Government pays the interest on loans for students from families with an adjusted income of $25,000 or less a year while those students are in college. That ceiling would now rise to an adjusted family income of $40,000 a year. A third form of federal aid, a work-study program that subsidizes 80% of the wages for student part-time jobs, would be expanded from $435 million to $600 million to cover 280,000 newly eligible students. In all, the Carter plan would aid 5 million students in 1979, 2 million more than present, and cost $500 million over the $1 billion that Carter originally hoped to earmark for such aid in fiscal 1979. "Increasingly, middle-income families, not just lower-income families, are being stretched to their financial limits by the growing costs of a university or college education," said Carter. In 1978, he pointed out, tuition, room and board will average $4,800 a year at private colleges and $2,500 at public universities.

Carter's hastily worked-out measure was designed to counter the popularity of the two rival aid proposals now before Congress. One plan, introduced in the Senate last fall by Oregon Republican Robert Packwood and New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, would allow a taxpayer to deduct up to 50% of the money paid for his children's tuition fees at private elementary and secondary schools and at colleges and universities, up to a limit of $500 per child. In comparison, the College Tuition Tax Relief Act proposed by Delaware's Republican Senator William Roth is, like Carter's plan, limited to college students. It calls for an income tax credit of $250 for a dependent's first full-time year in college, $300 for the second year, $400 for the third and $500 for the fourth. Neither of the plans sets a limit on family income.

Defending his own more limited remedy, Carter charged that the other programs would be excessively costly and un ocused. The Packwood - Moynihan proposal would cost the Treasury $4.7 billion a year and the Roth plan $1.9 billion v. Carter's $1.5 billion. Direct tax credits, the President added, would also "provide benefits to those who do not need them."

A number of college educators who favor financial help for the middle class but reject tax credits without any ceiling on income have rallied behind Carter. But a few have sided with parochial school forces in favoring tax credits. "Carter's plan is too little and too complicated," argues Middlebury College President Olin Robison.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars a child is nowhere near enough. And I favor a tax-credit system because it creates no new programs, no bureaucracy."

Meanwhile, neither Roth nor the Packwood-Moynihan team is prepared to abandon the tax-credit measures. Says Roth, whose proposal has passed the Senate three times but foundered in the House: "A majority in both the House and the Senate are sponsors of tuition tax cred its." No fewer than 252 members of the House and 57 Senators co-sponsored various tax credit bills in the past year. Nonetheless, Carter's proposal has gained support from influential members of the House Committee on Education and Labor. Either way, the chances are good that middle-income families will win some relief from the 95th Congress.

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