Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019 | 6:20 p.m.
CARSON CITY — Students who rely on Nevada’s Silver State Opportunity Grant may get a bit of relief in their course loads, if a bill currently in committee passes this session.
The grant currently is available to students at state or community colleges who are enrolled in 15 credit hours. The bill, the first ever filed by freshman Assemblywoman Selena Torres, D-Las Vegas, would lower that requirement to 12 hours.
Torres said that students who have a 15-hour credit load are expected to study around 30 to 45 hours a week, an amount of time she said was difficult to juggle with a family life and jobs.
“I don’t miss my sleepless nights during undergrad that were fueled by an abundance of coffee,” she said.
Crystal Abba, the vice chancellor of academic and student affairs with the Nevada System of Higher Education, said that while exact numbers are not known, the number of students enrolled in the program could increase to around 4,200.
The bill received support at the hearing from students.
Proponent Andrew Sierra, student body president of the College of Southern Nevada, said it would “vastly change the lives of many all over Nevada.”
Jacob Narvaez, a nontraditional student at CSN, said that due to the grant, “I was able to cut my hours at work and focus on getting fantastic grades in all my classes.”
According to a state report filed in 2017, the $2.5 million appropriated in both 2015-16 and 2016-17 was insufficient to award all eligible 15-credit students. The same report said that awarding all eligible students in the 15-hour program would cost around $4.6 million annually.
Increasing the field to include 12-hour programs would, according to that report, cost $15.2 million annually. There has not, as of now, been any fiscal note filed with the bill, so the expected cost is unclear.
“Please know, it’s not going to be inexpensive,” Abba said.
Higher credit loads are linked to a higher graduation rate — in the above report, it was found that Nevada students at a state or community college have about a 32 percent graduation rate at 15 credit hours, which drops to almost half of that at 12 hours and down to 3.5 percent at under 12 hours.
