Students to see grant checks get smaller

Thousands of students at Iowa’s private colleges and universities will see their Iowa Tuition Grant checks shrink for the coming semester. The Iowa College Aid Commission will meet this week to give formal approval to the reduction. Gary Nichols, executive director of the Iowa College Aid Commission, says students were notified that state budget cuts would reduce their grants for the spring. Nichols says they weren’t able to calculate the reduction until they’d made the fall grant payments and determined exactly how many students were due grants.Students got a two-thousand dollar grant for the fall, and they’ve been notified that their grant will be 16-hundred for the spring — a four-hundred dollar reduction.Nichols says 15-thousand-four-hundred students at the state’s private colleges are getting Iowa Tuition Grants. Conversely, the three-thousand Iowa students getting Iowa Vocational Grants — students enrolled in technical programs at state’s community colleges, are getting bigger grants than ever before. Last year’s grants were six-hundred-50 dollars. This year’s are nearly doubled, to 12-hundred dollars. But state budget cuts will pare that increase a tad — by 45 bucks.