General Assembly Scholarships may be numbered
By JOHN PUTERBAUGH jputerbaugh@daily-chronicle.com
The days of Illinois legislators waiving tuition fees at a state university for select constituents soon might be over.
A lack of funding for higher education and increased scrutiny in light of corruption at the University of Illinois, have pushed to the forefront the question of whether General Assembly Scholarships are worth the potential trouble.
“There has been legislation filed to abolish those scholarships,” said state Sen. Brad Burzynski (R-Rochelle). “If that were to come to a vote, I would support that.”
Each member of the General Assembly is given the option of awarding up to eight tuition waivers each year, Rep. Bob Pritchard (R-Hinckley) explained. It’s up to legislators to break the waivers up into year-long scholarships or full-ride scholarships.
Both Pritchard and Burzynski award one-year scholarships to eight students from their districts. While there are no state mandates regarding the process for awarding these waivers, Pritchard and Burzynski use independent scholarship committees to choose who will receive them each year. Both committees weigh such factors as academic strength, financial need and extracurricular and civic involvement.
The legislative scholarships cost state universities about $12 million per year, Burzynski said. That’s a relative drop in the bucket, compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to fully fund the state’s Monetary Assistance Program for underprivileged college candidates.
But they are perennial targets of public criticism, and universities do not necessarily regard them favorably.
Burzynski said momentum seems to be building among legislators to do away with the program entirely.
“I think the end of these scholarships is probably in sight,” Burzynski said. “There has been some abuse of that system in the past and maybe it’s time to do away with it.”
Both Burzynski and Pritchard currently take advantage of the General Assembly Scholarships. Both take applications from prospective students throughout the county beginning in January and ending in March. Eligible candidates must live within Pritchard’s or Burzynski’s respective districts and plan on attending a state university full-time.
Pritchard said he would be open to doing away with the scholarships if they would be replaced with more funding for higher education. He said he’s not in favor of abolishing the scholarships just for the sake of abolishing them.
“Another issue is the fact that the state doesn’t give the universities hard cash for these scholarships,” he said.
The program doesn’t actually reimburse state universities, which must ultimately absorb the cost of tuition lost on these scholarship recipients. Another problem, according to Ken Zehnder, director of state and local relations for Northern Illinois University, is that the university has no way of knowing in advance how many students will be attending the school on these waivers.
The university manages by anticipating about 100 scholarships per year and building it into the budget, Zehnder said. Still, he admits the situation is less than ideal.
“Would we prefer the waivers the university faces be funded?” he said. “Yes. Any program the legislature passes and the governor approves has to be funded. This is essentially a non-funded mandate.”
While more legislators may be ready to reconsider this program, others have wanted to do away with it for years. State Rep. Bill Black (R-Danville) hasn’t awarded one of these scholarships in more than 10 years and believes state legislators have no business awarding scholarships throughout the state.
“Scholarships should be the job of the Illinois Student Assistance Commission,” Black said. “The perception is they’re going to go to people with clout. And why do we want to perpetuate that? I just think the more we can reform perception, the better off we’ll be.”
While Burzynski hasn’t really heard anything – good or bad – from constituents, there’s another aspect that troubles him. He said his office doesn’t even get very many applications, compared to the number of eligible individuals in the county.
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