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Gov. Scott Walker state budget would gradually phase out the Wisconsin Covenant program in which high school students who maintain a B average and a good record of behavior are guaranteed a spot in a Wisconsin university and need-based aid. Walker’s budget says the program, created by former Gov. Jim Doyle, must be killed to prevent cutting other financial aid programs. But Covenant supporters say the program is more about promoting college attainment than handing out scholarships.

According to Walker’s executive budget summary, phasing out the Covenant program is needed to “prevent cuts to student financial aid and focus scarce resources” on other state aid programs, which his budget wouldn’t reduce. Walker guarantees that students who have already made the pledge – the first class of Covenant Scholars enters college this fall – would still receive the scholarships already promised to them.

uw-milwaukee (photo by adrian palomo)

In fact, while the program lasts, Walker is promising more grants than the Doyle administration, which previously only committed to providing the additional need-based aid (designed as a “gap filler” between other aid and tuition costs) to Covenant Scholars during their first two years of college. Walker is promising a full four years of grants.

Students have until Sept. 30 of their freshman year of high school to sign up for the Covenant. Walker’s budget would cut off the signup this fall, meaning the last class of Scholars would enter college in 2015.

Finding state funding for the scholarships has been an uncertain prospect since Doyle created the Covenant Program in 2007. He later cobbled together $25 million in state funds for them in the 2010-11 budget, money that served only as a placeholder because the program won’t begin awarding grants until this fall.

Further help came from a private endowment, the Wisconsin Covenant Foundation, founded by a $40 million donation from a nonprofit student loan company, the Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corp. It’s not clear yet what will happen to the Foundation now that the Covenant is marked for extinction.

Walker’s budget sets aside $9.6 million for Covenant grants in 2011-12 and $19.2 million in 2012-13. Emily Pope, a fiscal analyst with the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, says those figure were based on estimates of how many Covenant Scholars will be enrolled in college during those fiscal years. The budget also eliminates the Office of the Wisconsin Covenant, cuts one of its two positions and transfers the remaining one to the Wisconsin Higher Educational Aids Board, the agency that oversees state aid programs.

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“From a purely monetary perspective, (phasing out the Covenant) is not going to have a huge impact,” says Noel Radomski, director of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education. “It wasn’t so much about the scholarships; those were added sort of late in the game.”

Radomski says what the state would lose is a unified effort to promote college planning in the state. Most states, he says, have now implemented some kind of “pledge” program for students exchanging state assistance for meeting some academic standard.

Perhaps the earliest of them was Indiana’s 21st Century Scholars Program, founded in 1990. It gives need-based scholarships to students who maintain at least a C average and pledge to not use drugs or alcohol or commit a crime.

Although Walker’s budget doesn’t go after state aid for higher education, it slices off about 11 percent of the UW System’s funding.

“What strategy will the state employ in the future?” says Radomski of the Covenant’s demise. “If you look at other states, there are a lot of conversations going on right now. In Wisconsin, no one is talking about how, with the cuts, are we going to do things differently? The research is very clear that job growth is highly correlated with educational attainment in the state.”

Some UW schools have already hired their own Wisconsin Covenant Coordinators to facilitate the program, which is trying to find ways to better connect Covenant Scholars to student services that can support them after they start college.

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