In an effort to cut its costs,  the University of Virginia  changing a student aid policy that will pass the costs onto low-income students.

Inside Higher Ed’s Ry Rivard has the details.

Instead of guaranteeing that poor undergraduates can get through college debt-free, the University of Virginia decided it’s going to make low-income students borrow up to $28,000. That’s still a good deal, university officials say, for four years at one of American’s top public universities.

The changes, which take effect for incoming students this fall, have caused uproar on campus and raise questions about whether any good deed can stay funded.

By shifting burdens onto low-income students, the university can save $10.3 million a year in new costs by 2018. That’s real money at a time when U.Va, like most public colleges, knows that state support is limited. But at about the same time the change was announced, it had just finished a $12 million squash court and planned to beef up its marketing budget by nearly $18 million — raising questions for critics about whether the university really needed to change its aid policies.

A decade ago, U.Va. looked to shuck what its own consultant recently called its “elitist, preppy and homogeneous” culture and enroll more low-income students by offering them a full ride. The move came as elite private colleges were trying a similar approach, finding that telling low-income students they qualified for generous aid packages didn’t have nearly the impact as saying simply that if their family incomes were below certain levels, they could come without paying or borrowing.

The Virginia policy worked: applications from low-income students quickly rose from 702 in 2004 to more than 2,500 in 2012, and the program, known as AccessUVa, took off. But instead of keeping it up, the public university is scaling back AccessUVa because, the university says, it has

Internally, at least one board member has sharply questioned the university’s priorities.

In an email to members of the university’s Board of Visitors, a board member (and former chairwoman), Helen Dragas, said that after looking over a draft of the university’s long-term spending priorities, she found a new $17.5 million line item for advertising and communications but the same plan was “sadly” silent on new university money to aid low-income students through AccessUVa.

“What does this say about our priorities?” Dragas wrote in an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed (which was among documents first reported on by The Daily Progress).

Likewise, the student newspaper noted that while the university is cutting AccessUVa, officials had other priorities – “most damningly, a $12.4 million squash court.”