education

Thousands of students lost their chance for free tuition under the state's expanded Cal Grant program because community colleges failed to file required grade reports, according to an Assembly report released Monday.

The colleges, including about two dozen around Los Angeles and every one in Orange and Ventura counties, submitted only a small number of grades to the California Student Aid Commission, the study found.

Grade reports were required for the 11,250 grants that the billion-dollar program set aside for community college students. College officials said the grade submission process is too complicated for many financial aid departments. Administrative problems have plagued the Cal Grant program since it was expanded a year ago, when the Legislature increased its funding by about $600 million over five years. In the summer, the program had to return about $35 million in unspent grant money to the state's general fund.

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College officials and state lawmakers said too few students applied for the grants because the program did a poor job promoting them. They said earlier that they would ask the Legislature to provide $11 million in software that will enable colleges to submit the grade reports electronically.

Grant applicants were required to file federal student aid applications by March.

GPA Requirement Became Cumbersome

Shirley Donnelly, director of enrollment services at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, noted that colleges were required for the first time this year to calculate grade point averages only for courses whose credits transfer to a university. The officials had believed that more students would file the reports themselves, she added.

"We've got some of the neediest and highest-achieving students not receiving grants because their mentors just decided to pull them out of competition," said Paul Mitchell, legislative analyst for the Higher Education Committee.

"The state has made this so cumbersome for us," she added.

The aid commission allows each college to send grades for all students on computer disks or have students mail the GPA forms themselves. She also said campus officials did not know the unsubmitted reports would remove so many students from the competition.

Cal Grant administrators could not be reached for comment Monday.

And college officials said a large number of financial aid departments are not equipped to verify and submit grades electronically. "

Many Students Unaware of Procedure

Jan Braunstein, vice president of institutional development at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, said the campus was updating its software, so workers had to hand tally the 89 GPA reports it sent to the aid commission. Donnelly said Golden West financial aid workers had to compute GPA manually, which drastically reduced the number of submissions to the aid commission.

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