October 11, 2012

"If You Can Dream It, You Can Achieve It at an HBCU."

The Honorable Arne Duncan Secretary of Education U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue, SW Washington, DC 20202

Thank you for your consideration of our documented evidence about the direct and adverse impact on students attending or desirous of attending our institutions, as well as on the institutions themselves, as the direct result of modifications to the Parent PLUS loan approval criteria.

Since our meeting with you and our last communication with Under Secretary Kanter, we have gathered information on 98 of our member institutions, including the 38 UNCF member institutions, 47 TMCF institutions and more than a dozen other institutions represented among NAFEO's 197 member institutions. Our data reflect a loss of 14,616 students by these institutions, owing in large measure to the shift in the Parent PLUS loan application criteria, and the loss of millions of dollars to our institutions, funds critical to educating or training disproportionate numbers of low-income students.

We very much appreciate the Department's willingness to work with us to identify parents whose Parent PLUS applications were denied and to invite them to appeal in an expedited process put in place by the Department. We will accelerate our efforts in this regard, but given the initial response of the Department to our institutions, we are not optimistic that the individual appeals will yield favorable results in a timely manner. Accordingly, the United HBCU community of colleges and universities respectfully requests that you immediately take proactive steps to reverse the potentially disastrous impact on our families and institutions caused by the changes in criteria related to parent credit history and other factors. We specifically request the following actions to alleviate the hardship:

Reconsider all rejected/denied applications for loans applicable to this full academic year by applying the criteria used in previous years, prior to the recently approved changes. We ask that you grandfather in freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors under the previous criteria for this academic year.