Senate unanimously approves three ASG Scholarship board nominees

Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — ASG scholarships for students from low income families, scholarships offered for specialized fields, and the student loan program for local graduates, were the three main issues discussed during last Friday’s Senate Education Committee confirmation hearing for three, out of the five nominees to the American Samoa Student Financial Aid Board — referred to as the Scholarship Board.

The three nominees - Donna Gurr, Dr. Robin Faumuina-Vasai, and Lisa Gebauer — were present during the confirmation hearing. And they were later unanimously confirmed 13-0 during the Senate session on Friday.

According to information shared at the time of the hearing, the other two nominees - Rev. Mataio Failauga and Ruth Matagi-Fa’atili didn’t attend due to unforeseen circumstances.

CONFIRMATION HEARING

Sen. Fonoti Tafa’ifa Aufata questioned whether the board has a set policy of giving consideration for scholarships to students whose parents are low-income, saying that these are the students who need financial help to further their education.

Because the nominees are not yet confirmed and two of them — Dr. Faumuina-Vasai and Gebauer are new to the board —  Sen. Fai’ivae Iuli Godinet, who chaired the committee hearing and is also the Scholarship Board chairman, provided a reply.

He explained that low-income is not the focus for awarding scholarships, but there are already set criteria, such as GPA, and the SAT. He said the board focuses on the student’s performance in the set criteria. For example, a student must maintain a 3.8 GPA for an off-island scholarship — which is four-years — and 3.6 GPA for the American Samoa Community College, a two-year program.

Additionally, off-island scholarship recipients must continue to meet all requirements, including their GPA, under their scholarship agreement. But Fai’ivae points out that there are cases in which a student, after the first or second semester, couldn’t maintain the GPA to remain qualified for the scholarship. And the student would “disappear” without any word to the board.

However, Fonoti re-emphasized her call for the government and the board to seriously take into consideration students from low-income families and those are the students who need financial help the most.

Fai’ivae pointed out that government has the student loan program, for which students can apply if they don’t get an ASG scholarship. However, that program is currently on hold as the board works with ASG Human Resources Department to identify individuals, who were student-loan recipients working in government — to repay their loans.

He said the board estimates that more than $10 million in ASG funds have been used for student loans, while repayment of loans has not even reached $1 million.

Sen. Utu Sila Poasa suggested to the nominees as well as Fai’ivae — who is the Senate President’s appointee to the board — to look at providing scholarships for specialized fields that are hard to fill positions, such as accountants, medical doctors and engineers — all different fields of engineering, such as civil engineer, environmental, and mechanical. Utu said many engineers working in the territory are from off island.

Fai’ivae said the board had discussed this particular issue and Gurr added that the board is looking into these hard-to-fill areas, and “perhaps we can give additional funding to them.” She pointed out that some of these specialized areas require schooling of more than four years at colleges and universities off-island.

For example, there’s a recipient whose college program takes five years and the board takes on these scholarship cases on an “individual basis, although we don’t advertise that, but that’s something we can do” for the specialized fields, said Gurr.

Gurr, the current board vice-chair, said one of the things that happens after awarding scholarships and students declare certain majors, “sometime they go off [island] and change their major.”

“The other thing that we face, a lot of students that major in those specialized fields are offered very, very high salaries off-island — over $100,000. So it’s really hard to entice our students to come back, return to American Samoa,” she said, adding that a lot of students do want to come back home after earning their degrees, but are faced with paying off some of their student debt.

Sen. Malaepule Saite Moliga, who is also a member of the DBAS board of directors, confirmed that the student loan program is on hold at this point and the board is working on ways to help student-recipients repay their student loans as many student loan recipients, returned home but ignore repaying the loan.

Towards the end of last year, he said the board developed a program offering a 50% reduction from the initial total loan and DBAS has collected about $500,000 in loan payments. He said some of these loans involved students who returned home 20 years ago, with the student having no plan to repay the loan but that debt remains under the student’s name including their credit report.

He hopes the DBAS board, along with the new scholarship board once all nominees are confirmed by the Fono, will meet with the local Education Department (ASDOE) for further discussion on the student loan program.

He said the problem faced with DBAS is that ASDOE makes the MOU with parents for the student loan, while the burden of collection falls on DBAS. He believes the MOU should be between parents and DBAS, the source of the money.

On the issue raised by Utu on specialized professions, “we’re willing to provide scholarships for special-needed skills and the money is [borrowed] from DBAS,” he said noting that this is an ongoing discussion issue.

It was agreed among the committee to hold possible future hearings to discuss any further issues once the Scholarship board is in place.