OWINGS MILL, Md. — Again and again, college financial aid offices would frustrate Jan Wagner and Michele Waxman Johnson.
As executives of Central Scholarship, a nonprofit in Owings Mills that provides scholarships and interest-free loans to Maryland students, they would award a student money and a university would reduce that student’s financial aid by the same amount.
“It totally undermines our very existence,” said Wagner, Central Scholarship’s president.
The common practice provoked Wagner and Johnson, the organization’s vice president, into a two-year campaign to stop it. Their effort led to a new law that took effect on July 1, making Maryland the first state to ban scholarship displacement by public colleges.
“This is a David and Goliath thing, honestly” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, an education professor at Temple University who has researched scholarship displacement. “I have never seen anything like Central Scholarship, quite frankly. Michele Johnson and her team are so dogged.”
Maryland’s new law now limits the conditions under which institutions may decrease financial aid, allowing reductions when a student’s aid exceeds the cost of college or with permission from a scholarship provider.
Goldrick-Rab and other researchers say the law could prompt other states to adopt similar bans.
