Yesterday, President Obama visited Northern Virginia Community College to sign the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, shorthanded by lawmakers as “SAFRA.”

One reason the President signed the bill at a community college is to underscore that the new law includes $2 billion to improve educational and career training programs at community colleges. These 2-year schools can be a smart alternative for students and their families who are looking to save money, but attain an associate’s degree, or stay on path to a bachelor’s.

Nevertheless, four-year schools get ever more costly and the bill does nothing to directly address the high cost of college, through previously discussed methods such as price controls or penalties to schools for raising their prices above certain levels.

For instance, the bill authorizes $36 billion for the Pell Grant program, increasing the maximum award for the next academic year to $5550 and, beginning in 2013, indexing increases in Pell Grant to the cost of living. Pell Grants are the “foundation” student aid program, meaning that students must first utilize a Pell Grant before any other need-based financial aid is awarded.

According to supporters of the bill, this new money became available for Pell Grants due to savings that were made by the elimination of Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program and the conversion of all federal student loans to the Federal Direct Student Loan (FDSL) program, administered by the U.S. Department of Education. Supporters of the bill noted that elimination of the FFEL program and originating all new loans in the FDSL program will yield a net savings of $61 billion over the next 10 years.

One other use of this savings will be to place an additional $1.5 billion into income-based repayment for student loans. Starting in 2014, new borrowers will be able to cap their student loan payments at just 10 percent of their adjusted gross income.

Despite the passage of “SAFRA,” the fact remains that college costs continue to go up, with many selective private schools already announcing tuition increases of more than 4%, and many state schools looking at double-digit percentage increases.

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If you’ve been following the health care reform debate closely over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that the elongated process has fostered some strange bedfellows – student loans and reconciliation.

Now, as the proposed legislative action appears to draw to a close, you may have also paid enough attention to the mainstream press to sort of understand why reconciliation is being used to push through health care reform. You may agree or disagree with the proposed reforms, and you may agree or disagree with the use of reconciliation, but you probably see why President Obama and congressional Democratic leaders have chosen this particular route to passage. In short, it’s the only route to passage.

But you still may have a nagging question in the back of your mind: what in the world do student loans have to do with health care reform?

The answer lies within that mysterious process of reconciliation, where it seems all legislative roads must lead. According to the Senate parliamentarian (who right now may be the most powerful person in Washington), there is an immovable threshold that health care reform must cross in order for reconciliation to be utilized: $1 billion in deficit savings from both the Senate Finance Committee, and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee over the next 10 years.

As reported in POLITICO, “With health care alone, the HELP Committee would not be able to show that the items within its jurisdiction save at least $1 billion.”

Therefore, the “savings” from student loan reform are necessary to push health care reform over this arbitrary threshold. I put “savings” in quotes and call it an arbitrary threshold because I fail to be convinced that student loan reform will result in savings at all for the federal government.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), who supports a combining of the two measures, phrased it deliciously when explaining why. The student loan reform package, he told POLITICO, “gives more buoyancy” to the overall bill.

Somehow, the image I see from “buoyancy” doesn’t connote savings to me. Instead, it signals a marriage of convenience: those who may not be totally sold on health care reform can say “but in the end I had to vote for college students and their ability to pay for college.” Or, the mirror image might be true. A skeptic on student loan reform (and there are many) might be heard to say this weekend: “We can no longer let people in this country go without health insurance.”
The bottom line is that many members of Congress, for strong philosophical reasons, either support or oppose both health care and student loan reform. They are not affected by this parliamentary maneuver because they would have voted the same way anyway.

However, there are enough members of Congress who are torn about what to do on health care reform, or student loan reform, or both, and reconciliation provides them some political cover to try to better explain how they voted to their constituents. It’s murky enough to allow them to have it both ways, to have their legislative cake and eat it too.

The core of student loan reform would be to end the subsidies given to private lenders who distribute student-loan money and instead require all colleges to use the Education Department’s own direct-lending system. That may – or may not – be a cure for the ills of higher education, but it is certainly a short-term Rx for health care reform.

What do you think about all this legislative maneuvering? Share your views on Hoverings: A Blog for Current and Future College Parents, located on the home page of www.collegeparents.org. Thank you for your continuing interest in College Parents of America.

It’s parental nature, for most of us, to hope for positive scenarios when it comes to our children and their college education.

So it’s only natural, therefore, for those of us who are parents of would-be college athletes, to dream they can beat the odds and win a college scholarship.

Do you happen to know just how long those odds are?

I’ve done some research and they are very long. While stats are not available for every sport, the NCAA Web site (www.ncaa.org) has an interesting page that shows the odds of a high school athlete getting a college scholarship in men’s and women’s basketball, football, baseball, football, men’s ice hockey and men’s soccer. The same page also gives the odds of that same high school athlete being drafted as a pro in each of those sports.

The challenge is daunting to say the least. So, even if you are convinced that your child is the next Drew Brees, or the next Lisa Leslie, I strongly recommend a plan B.

I happen to have two sons who are playing high school ice hockey, where the odds of a college scholarship, and subsequent pro career, are the best that I’ve seen. However, my wife and I have asked our sons: have you ever heard of a NHL player from the District of Columbia (where they play) or Virginia (where we live)? (They haven’t, because there has never been one from either place.)

So what are those ice hockey stats? Partly because high school participation rates are so low compared to other sports, one in nine of boy high school hockey players, or 11%, go on to play in college and 0.31%, continue to play in the pros.

From there the odds for every other sport (where stats are available) get much longer.

Football, which has the most widespread participation of any high school sport, is in the middle of the pack odds-wise in terms of the chances of attaining a college scholarship. One in 17 high school football players, or 5.8%, go on to earn a college scholarship and one in 1,200 of those same high school gridiron greats make it to the NFL.

Another way to look at it: there are eleven players on each side in a football game and most players these days specialize in offense or defense. Scan the local paper on a Saturday morning, and count 52 game scores from contests played under the Friday night lights. Out of all of the starters in all of those games, 52 games X 22 players, the odds are that exactly one of those young men will make it the NFL – the real version that is, though Madden 2010 is another matter.

The odds of a high school soccer player attaining a scholarship are almost identical to football, as are the odds of such a youngster, no matter how talented, making it in the MLS.

Baseball is slightly better when it comes to odds of attaining a college scholarship – one in 17, or 6.4%, will do so – but the chances of getting drafted to the pros is better than either football or soccer, with a whopping one in 225, or 0.44%, being chosen. However, there are many more draftees in baseball – and more levels of “professional” – than any other sport, so the odds of actually making it to the MLB are still highly stacked against any youngster.

And speaking of odds, the sport of basketball is the toughest of all, not only for boys and their chances of a college scholarship, but also for girls, though it must be noted that this sport is the only one where statistics for female athletes are readily available.

Of all the girls who participate in high school basketball, only 3.4%, attain a college basketball scholarship and only one in 5000, or 0.02%, eventually make it to the WNBA.

The odds of a male basketball player making it to college hoops or the pros are even longer. Only 3.1% go on from high school to play in the college game and, of all the high school basketball players in the U.S., only one in 3300, or 0.03%, make it to the NBA. Picturing that figure in team terms, only one fortunate and talented young man out of every seven high school starting fives will receive a college basketball scholarship. And only one incredibly gifted and determined young man out of every 660 starting fives will play in the pros.

So, as Super Bowl Sunday approaches, and America’s focus turns to sports, enjoy yourself watching the game and encourage the young people in your family to pursue their athletic dreams. As they do so, however, temper your own enthusiasm for how far such dreams may take your own children, as the odds are much greater that Super Bowls down the road will find them on the couch battling you for the remote, as opposed to on the field battling for victory.

Before you settle down on that couch, here are some stories of interest from Inside Higher Ed, the leading online publication covering the world of colleges and universities. As per our weekly custom, these several stories below follow the trends and developments in higher education that IHE editors and I think will be of interest to parents. Read, learn and enjoy yourself, then forward this column to friends who you think may also be interested in empowering themselves to best support their children on the path to and through college.

The race for financial aid dollars has begun.  On January 1, the annual window opened in which families must submit key pieces of information to the colleges and universities that your children will or might attend in the fall.  And you as parents must approach the starting blocks with one essential form in your sights – the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.  This must-do application helps colleges make decisions about how and to whom they award precious, need-based financial aid dollars.  Please share your experience in working the FAFSA by making a comment on Hoverings: A Blog for Current and Future College Parents on the home page of www.collegeparents.org.  Your fellow parents will appreciate your insight and advice!

Lieteracy is a huge problem in the U.S. and I don’t just mean the ability to read.  For college students in particular, I am referring to financial literacy.  The proliferation of credit cards and the ever-present temptation of using college loans for personal wants may lead students down a dangerous path.  Parents can be important teachers of financial literacy.  What successful strategies have you used to teach financial literacy to your kids?  Please share your own best practices with your parent peers here and/or on Hoverings: A Blog for Current and Future Parents at www.collegeparents.org