The Pell Grant program is continuing to evolve on a year-to-year basis, and the 2010-11 school year bears no exception. In 2010 the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, or SAFRA, was signed into law, and with it came significant revisions to the overall reach of the Pell Grant, and the amount of aid that would be available to students over time.
Change to Eligibility
SAFRA has essentially made the Pell Grant available to more students from around the country by injecting billions of additional dollars into the program, and by loosening the financial need requirement for the award by a small amount. This small amount will however have a huge effect on a thousands of students who were treading the line in terms of the EFC cutoff threshold, which has now been increased from 4,617 to 5,273.
This is now the new EFC cutoff threshold, and having an EFC value above 5,273 will negate your ability to get a Pell Grant for that particular award year. This should be a good thing for thousands of students who were unable to qualify for the grant before 2010-11, and ultimately this will make the Pell Grant more available to students who come from middle-class families.
Increasing of Award Amounts
The maximum Pell Grant amount has been increased to 5,550 for the 2010-11 school year. SAFRA has made it so that this award amount will increase annually in accordance with the Consumer Price Index + 1% beginning in 2014. This was done to combat inflation, and it remains to be seen whether or not it will accomplish just that.
If the maximum Pell Grant amount does increase according to the CPI + 1% each year beginning in 2014, by the 2019-20 school year it should rise up to 5,975 dollars. Critics argue that this isn’t nearly enough, and that SAFRA failed in its original mission of increasing the amount to 6,900 dollars by 2020. Regardless, it is how the current policy is written, and over time I wouldn’t be surprised if new legislation was introduced that increased this amount by an even larger margin.
