Demand for New Student-Aid Programs Falls Short

What if you set out a pot of $790 million for the needy and hundreds of millions of it went unclaimed?

That’s the quandary facing the Department of Education, which is reviewing why many eligible students seem not to have taken advantage of two new federal grant programs that help high-performing students from low-income backgrounds pay for college.

The SMART Grants —for National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent—and the Academic Competitiveness Grants were signed into law in early 2006 and became available to students starting in the 2006-07 school year. The programs were designed to entice more low-income high school students into taking rigorous classes in high-demand fields such as science, mathematics, technology, engineering, and such “critical” foreign languages...