BILL ANALYSIS �
Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary
Senator Kevin de Le�n, Chair
AB 938 (Weber) - California State University: Student Success
Fees
Amended: July 2, 2014 Policy Vote: Education 6-0
Urgency: No Mandate: No
Hearing Date: August 4, 2014
Consultant: Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez
This bill meets the criteria for referral to the Suspense File.
Bill Summary: AB 938 requires a campus of the California State
University (CSU) that has implemented a student success fee to
use its institutional aid to pay the cost of the student success
fee for low-income students, as defined.
Fiscal Impact:
Potentially significant costs to the CSU, to increase
institutional aid to low-income students who: a) attend
campuses that have enacted student success fees; and, b)
receive institutional aid in an amount less than the student
success fee level.
Administration: Potentially significant ongoing workload
for the CSU to implement the provisions of this bill
ensuring that campuses provide each low-income student with
institutional aid that is at least equal to a campus's
student success fee level, as applicable.
Background: Existing law authorizes the CSU Board of Trustees to
adopt regulations to require all persons to pay fees, rents,
deposits, and charges for services, facilities or materials
provided by the trustees to such persons. The Trustees are also
authorized to provide for the method of collecting such fees,
rents, deposits, and charges, and to provide for the refund of
such fees, rents, deposits, and charges collected in error or
collected for facilities, services, or materials not utilized.
(Education Code � 89700)
Student success fees are category 2 campus-based mandatory fees.
Like other campus-based mandatory fees they are included in the
cost of attendance, and included in financial aid awards.
Proposed Law: This bill requires a CSU campus that has
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implemented a student success fee to use its institutional aid
to pay the cost of the student success fee for low-income
students, as defined in the statute.
Staff Comments: Currently, CSU campuses are prohibited (until
January 1, 2016) from enacting new student success fees, but the
12 campuses that have student success fees in place are
permitted to continue to collect them. This bill would provide
that any campus that collects a student success fee use
institutional aid to cover the cost of the fee for low-income
students, and defines low-income student as one whose expected
family contribution would qualify the student to receive a
federal Pell Grant. While it can vary by family size, for most
students this means a family income below $50,000.
The cost of the bill would be to provide additional
institutional aid for any low-income student that would receive
less money in institutional aid than the level of student
success fee at his or her school. Because sources of financial
aid (e.g. Cal Grant, Pell Grant, or institutional aid) are
combined and applied as a "package" to a student's total
financial "need" to attend the CSU, there is no direct
application of certain funding sources to certain expenses. For
example, while a Cal Grant B award for access costs has a stated
purpose, the $1,473 award goes into a package with other monies,
and the student's expenses are paid by that package;
functionally, the funding sources are fully fungible within the
student's aid package. Thus, the only test for whether or not a
CSU campus is providing institutional aid to a low-income
student to cover the cost of a student success fee is whether or
not the student is receiving an amount of institutional aid that
is equal to, or greater than, the student success fee.
Approximately 130,000 low-income students are enrolled in the
CSU. The CSU has indicated that a typical low-income
undergraduate student would receive $5,472 in institutional aid;
the amount is linked to fully funding the cost of systemwide
tuition. Thus, for most students, there need not be an impact to
their institutional aid award amount. There will, however, be
outliers for which the CSU would need to provide additional
institutional aid. This is likely to include students who have
exhausted lifetime limits on grant aid, students who have
significant private scholarships that have replaced
institutional aid, and graduate students (who generally receive
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far less institutional aid than undergraduate students).
These requirements are also likely to generate significant
administrative workload for CSU to implement a system for
verifying institutional aid levels for each low-income student,
and augmenting them as necessary.