Editor’s note: This story is the product of a collaboration between the Underground Workshop and students in Professor Ben Dangl’s strategic writing course at UVM. The Underground Workshop is a collaborative network of student journalists from across Vermont. For more information please email the Workshop’s editor, Ben Heintz, at ben@vtdigger.org.
“Free money” and missed opportunities: HEERF grants at UVM
by Amelia Berlandi and Nataleigh Noble, UVM
Alyssa White and her parents have a plan to pay for her education. White is a junior at the University of Vermont, which ranks as the 7th highest out-of-state tuition costs of public institutions in the country, totaling around $40,000 each year. White’s agreement with her family is that she will pay back 70% of her tuition after college.
The pandemic, however, complicated matters.
“My dad got laid off twice during Covid. Once last year, and then this year,” White said. “So that was stressful for my family, and for me going to school.
White is not alone. The pandemic financially affected families across the country.
On March 27, 2020, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES), which allotted $2.2 trillion to provide economic aid to Americans impacted by Covid-19. $14 billion was sent to the Office of Postsecondary Education, and thus the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) was born.
The grants were intended to assist students like White to cover emergency expenses that may have arisen due to the pandemic, which UVM defined as any cost relating to housing, food, health care, child care, or outstanding tuition balance expenses.
Yet the question remains: Did the HEERF grant provide the relief it promised?
Alyssa White would say it did not. She did not hear of the grant until after the applications had closed, and therefore did not receive any funds, despite the pandemic’s impact on her family’s financial stability. This would turn out to be a common theme among undergraduates.
White is one of many students who lost their chance at Covid relief because they were unaware of the grant’s existence.
For others, though, getting the HEERF money was almost too easy.
These contrasting experiences raise questions about the efficacy of the HEERF process at UVM.
Three Grants, $36M
According to the U.S. Department of Education’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, all students who were enrolled in a university prior to March 13, 2020 were eligible to receive grant money.
UVM received $7,055,880 through the CARES Act, or HEERF I, and was required to dedicate at least 50% to student aid. HEERF II and HEERF III followed, totaling another $29,736,993.
To put these numbers into perspective, if all $36,792,873 were divided equally amongst the 11,000 undergraduate students of UVM, each would have received around $3,300.
The Department of Education directed institutions to prioritize students with exceptional need. This includes Pell Grant recipients and students with extraordinary financial circumstances, “who may be eligible for other federal or state need-based aid or have faced significant unexpected expenses, such as the loss of employment (either for themselves or their families), reduced income, or food or housing insecurity.”
UVM Student Financial Services responded to a request for an interview with an email. Their response, crafted with the UVM Communications office, addressed questions about the way HEERF was distributed and communicated to students.
“A portion of the funding was issued to students without an application, to ensure the highest need students, based on the FAFSA, were being supported,” they reported.
For example, funds from HEERF II were awarded first to students whose 2020-2021 FAFSA had an Expected Family Contribution of up to $9,999 and had received less than $1,000 from the CARES Act. These students were automatically granted money.
According to Student Financial Services, UVM has distributed $16,600,486 in total to students. This is the portion of the HEERF money that the office handled, and was labeled “Direct to Student Funds”. It is unclear how much of that number was automatically awarded to students with exceptional need.
“Free Money”
Those who didn’t automatically receive grant money could apply on the UVM website by answering just a few short questions. Students were asked about the financial issues they faced during Covid, the amount of money the student hoped to receive, what they planned on using the funds for, and if they received financial aid in any capacity.
Essentially, the application relied on the honor system. This is where the distribution process may have gone awry. Around campus, receiving the HEERF grant is known as getting “free money.”
Cecelia Pennell is a student who benefited from the HEERF grant.
“I heard about the grant from a friend randomly one day,” she said, “and no more than 48 hours after I filled out the short form, I received an email from financial services confirming the deposit.” When she checked her bank account, $5,000 had appeared.
Anecdotally, many UVM students reported that their friends applied for upwards of $3,000 from the HEERF grant, received the money, and used it in ways unrelated to the emergency expenses that the grants were intended to cover.
“I remember hearing from a few of my friends that they spent the money they received from the HEERF grant on a weekend trip to Montreal,” UVM junior Will Rickert said.
Missed Opportunities
In their response to the above-mentioned interview request, Student Financial Services wrote that “[a]ll potentially eligible, enrolled students at the time were notified of the option to apply.”
But most students say this notice never appeared in their inboxes.
Of the 37 UVM students who responded to an anonymous online questionnaire distributed for this story, only two found out about the HEERF grant through an email from the university. It is unclear whether these two students received an email because they were automatic recipients.
Most others heard about the available money through word of mouth. Some never learned of the HEERF grants at all.
Student Henry Clapp is part of the latter group. Clapp works in a restaurant when he’s not at school, and due to Covid restrictions placed on restaurants, he was unable to work as much as he needed to.
“That [money] could definitely help pick up some of those hours that I lost,” Clapp said.
He was not aware of the grant’s existence until 5 months after the last application closed.
According to other students, simply being aware of HEERF was not enough – this opportunity and the subsequent application were not clearly advertised on the UVM website or social media pages.
Will Rickert says that by the time he found the application with a friend’s help, he was deep in the trenches of the UVM website.
“It was so difficult for me to even get to the page where I could apply for it,” he said.
This is not the only problem students encountered after learning about the grant– the shorter windows of time that HEERF II and III were open created another obstacle.
According to Student Financial Services, the application for HEERF I was open roughly between May 12, 2020 to November 24, 2020.
As campus reopened, so did applications for HEERF II and HEERF III. Students could apply between March 15, 2021 to April 5, 2021, and August 13, 2021 to October 15, 2021, respectively.
Rickert says he just barely made it before the last round closed.
Isolated by the dorms, UVM’s strict Covid rules, and a broken leg, Rickert was unable to work and therefore, maintain a steady income. After submitting his application, he received $1,300.
“I worry about money all the time,” Rickert said. “I paid for a lot of food. I paid fraternity dues. I paid for daily necessities. A lot of stress was lifted off of me.”
Other students did not share that same sense of relief. Many were left to wonder why they were unaware of HEERF for so long, and what those funds could have done for them over the past two years.
Alyssa White is frustrated to have missed out on this opportunity. Had she been notified of the grant earlier, she could have received the aid she needed.
“I’m also really stressed about after college,” White said. “I’m going to have to be paying back [tuition] after school for a long time. And so putting money towards that would have been helpful.”
