Olivia Allery, news editor 

On April 3, Minnesota lawmakers announced that they may have found $5 million to plug back into the Fostering Independence Grant (FIG) program. This would allow FIG to remain in place, after fears of a funding gap for the 2024-2025 school year due to inflation and not enough funds to take away a portion of state grants for FIG recipients.

According to the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, the FIG program helps in covering the cost of tuition and living expenses for students who have previously been in foster care. The program requires  the recipient to be under 27 years of age and completed a high school education to recieve the funding. “This is an extremely important issue for us,” said Sen. Omar Fateh in a quote from Star Tribune. “What we know is that these grants help a population that is less likely to go to college and more likely to drop out.” 

The program began to start supporting students in the 2022-2023 academic year, after being passed in the legislature in 2021. According to MPR News, the State Financial Aid Program Administrator for FIG Adam Johnson had only projected a 4% growth in students receiving grants from FIG in 2023-2024. This calculation was grossly surpassed, and the number of students in the program actually shot up 34%. With this growth it was estimated the total number of 2024-2025 FIG students to be up to over 800, from the original 492 recipients in 2022-2023.

According to MPR News, this growth was most likely from promotion and new awareness of the FIG program and its grants now becoming the primary reason for students previously in foster care to attend college. While it was amazing that there were so many new students now able to go to college, the miscalculation also meant that the FIG funding wasn’t going to have the budget to support the program fully for the students in 2024-2025. 

According to MPR News, the Minnesota Office for Higher Education had strongly advised the state legislature to add new language to the existing law, and to create a waitlist for those who would not be covered. According to MPR News, with this plan, Administrator Johnson estimated only 60% of the students in the FIG program were going to be covered, leaving uncertainty for the 664 recipients. 

“I’m devastated,” said Nia Dyer, Minnesota State University of Moorhead junior and FIG recipient. “I’m one year away from graduating college and my educational journey is something that I’ve struggled with my entire life. So being that close to achieving a dream of mine and then hearing that I might not be able to afford to go back, it was a hard hit.”

According to the Star Tribune, the temporary solution to avoid the shortfall is to plug FIG funding with a portion of the new North Star Promise Scholarship Program,  which was set to have $117 million attached to it to allow free tuition for families with incomes less than $80,000. 

“I think this is exactly what we needed to do this year,” said Sen. Jason Rarick, R-Pine City, who helped create the FIG program. “Figure out the shortfall for this year, and we can come back next year to have a deeper dive into it and make sure that this program will be funded fully going forward.”