Cash for college

Gov. Steve Beshear acted wisely in having the state buy a $50 million bond from the Kentucky Higher Education Student Loan Corp., so the agency will have money to offer.

Had this not been done, the most likely losers would have been low-income students, who have more difficulty borrowing from private lenders.

This issue is on Mr. Beshear's priority list, given the regular tuition hikes imposed by public campus boards in recent years. It's also on the minds of business leaders at the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, who are proposing a new approach to state aid. Called the Guaranteed Affordability Program, it would divide the burden of meeting college costs among students, families, schools and government:

(1) GAP would assume that students could contribute an amount equal to what they could earn during a 40-hour work week in the summer and 10 to 15 hours per week during the school year at a minimum wage job. That amount also could come from any private scholarships, or any grade-based Kentucky Educational Excellence Scholarship, that a high school student earned. (2) Families would be expected to contribute an amount determined by federal financial aid guidelines. (3) The college or university a student attends could also contribute directly, with a scholarship or other funding that is applied to the cost of tuition.

If more were needed to fund a student's attending a public college or university, the state would provide it.

Nobody is saying how the state would come up with its part. Chamber president David Adkisson says his organization just put the idea out there for discussion and debate.

Asked for a hypothetical example of how this might affect a family, neither he nor several government officials would offer one. It's apparently all too complex and preliminary for hypotheticals, but worth discussing. Sort of like weather-watchers discussing how useful rain would be, to end a drought.

— The Courier-Journal, Louisville