In the last legislative session, lawmakers tried to bolster the state’s lagging student financial aid options with several bills, including one that pegged scholarships to a commitment to live in Idaho after graduation.

Another offered financial aid to students who reject alcohol and drugs. The only thing the proposals had in common: none passed.

Next year, the state Board of Education wants policy makers to offer a unified proposal - one they can navigate through the choppy waters of budgeting and floor debates with thrifty and often skeptical lawmakers.

To meet that aim, the board cobbled together a new task force on financial aid. The panel of lawmakers, financial aid directors and education professionals had its first meeting Monday and agreed, above all, that Idaho is trailing most of the region in this respect.

“I think this is a high priority for the state,” said Sue Thilo, a state board member. “It’s just you had so many bills and so many proposals to the point the Legislature said, ‘You need to look at this,’ and that’s what we’re doing right now.”

Idaho offers students precious little scholarship money compared to other states, and virtually none of that is guaranteed for its poorest high school graduates.

The task force’s stated goal is to create the framework for a need-based financial aid program. Such a program would supplement Idaho’s merit-based Promise scholarships, which offer $3,000 annual scholarships to 25 students attending in-state schools, and $250 per semester packages to hundreds of students.

The Promise scholarships are doubly inadequate, said state Rep. Tom Trail, R-Moscow. They fail to lure Idaho’s elite students and are too small to cover tuition costs for low- and middle-income students.

The dearth of financial aid leads to other problems, Trail said, noting Idaho’s state schools are not churning out enough job candidates to satisfy the state’s burgeoning business sector.

“When we lose students to other states for college,” he said, “they’re probably not coming back, except as tourists.”

Partly due to lackluster financial aid offerings, Idaho sends a mere 34 percent of its high school graduates on to college, placing it among the bottom-five states in that regard.

What’s most troubling about that statistic is the Gem State’s impressive high school graduation rate of 77 percent, said Dana Kelly, student affairs program manager with the Idaho Department of Education.

Idaho offers only $17 of need-based financial aid per full-time student, compared with a national average of $387 and a robust $509 in neighboring Washington, according to figures from the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education.

Much of the annual money Idaho grants to individual colleges and universities is redistributed as aid - $811 per student - but none of that money specifically is set aside for poor students, said David Longanecker, executive director of the interstate commission.

Low tuition rates long have been a mainstay of the state’s education policy. But Longanecker said cheap tuition does not increase access.

In the West, Washington has a thriving financial aid program, paid for largely by higher tuition costs, Longanecker said. He also hailed a proposal in Oregon that doles out individual aid to each student based on a formula of income, federal aid already received, school subsidies and academic merit.

Wyoming pays most or all tuition for in-state students from a windfall built by oil and gas taxes.

Since Idaho is one of the few states with no statewide financial aid program, Longanecker said, the state can carve a framework from the policies that have worked best elsewhere.

“One benefit you have is you can do a much better job than many other states -states who are working by reacting to the past,” he said.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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