More than 1,000 colleges -- including Penn -- could qualify for a portion of the $10 million in aid that a new law provides for institutions that temporarily accepted students displaced by Hurricane Katrina, but University officials aren't chomping at the bit to get it.
The law, signed on Dec. 30, allows the Department of Education to distribute the federal aid among schools that temporarily enrolled some of the more than 18,000 students displaced by last year's Gulf Coast hurricanes without charging tuition.
Penn hosted 110 Philadelphia-area undergraduates enrolled in New Orleans schools for the fall.
The Department of Education will use data that schools submitted in November to determine the allocation of funds, according to Jane Glickman, a spokeswoman for the department.
The federal officials do not yet have an estimate of the average amount of aid schools would receive, according to Glickman.
But Penn Associate Vice President for Finance Frank Claus Penn does not really need the money.
Because the displaced students whom Penn admitted lived off campus and were enrolled in classes that were not yet full, any costs to the University were low, according to Claus.
He and Mike Harris, a Penn associate vice president, both noted that while monetary costs were a minor factor, administrators committed many hours of work to overseeing the relocated students.
But some schools incurred greater costs than Penn did. Molly deRamel, a spokeswoman for Brown University, said that Brown provided on-campus housing and other resources to the 59 undergraduates and 27 graduate students from across the nation that temporarily enrolled there.
"I'm sure they cost just as much as any other Brown student," she said.
Harris said that Penn does not consider federal aid a top priority.
"At the time the decisions were made to help students who were affected, I don't think it was made by a consideration of the financial impact," Harris said. "It was the right thing to do."
Harris added that Penn had planned to absorb any extra costs.
"I don't want to say that there wasn't a financial commitment, but it was not a determining factor," he said.
Princeton decided not to request compensation for its enrollment of 29 displaced students if money was made available, according to spokeswoman Cass Cliatt.
Despite the reluctance of some schools to accept funds, Glickman wrote in an e-mail that "several institutions had requested this kind of assistance, particularly those that took substantial numbers of displaced students."
On the state level, the University has received about $86,000 from the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency to be given to Penn students from regions affected by Hurricane Katrina, Claus said. Students from these regions can apply for a financial aid evaluation or re-evaluation, though among the approximately 140 students from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, "there has been only a modest request so far," Claus said.
Claus, Harris and Glickman agreed that the potential to receive federal aid is unlikely to affect colleges' and universities' decisions to admit students displaced by future disasters.
Claus described the nationwide enrollment as a rescue effort.
"Most of the colleges and universities involved worked to their capacity to do what they had to do," he said.
