Ben Kohl, assistant director of financial aid at Kansas State University, shows the Kansas Board of Regents the manual of federal regulations that his and other financial aid offices have to use to determine whether students are eligible for Pell Grants, student loans, work study and other forms of student aid.

Topeka ? More than 37 percent of students attending four-year universities in Kansas received Pell Grants last year, far more than the national average, according to a report delivered Thursday to the Kansas Board of Regents.

But those grants, which covered up to 99 percent of the cost of tuition and fees a decade ago, now only cover about 63 percent of the cost.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that as tuition has gone up, there’s been more burden on families, because we’ve not had the aid and state support has gone down,” Regents president and CEO Andy Tompkins said.

Pell Grants are the most basic kind of need-based federal student financial aid. All students apply for them if they fill out the Federal Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA form. But they are awarded according to a complex formula based on the financial status of the student’s family and the cost of attending a particular school.

The information about Pell Grants was included in a report about the board’s long-range strategic plan, Foresight 2020. One of the goals of that plan is to increase the higher education attainment level throughout the Kansas Population.

But it also came out the same week as a national report by the advocacy group Young Invincibles that gave Kansas a grade of F for the amount of student financial aid it makes available to students.

That report said Kansas awards an average of $123 per student in financial aid, well below the national average of $561 per student.

The Foresight 2020 report showed that many more students at community colleges and technical schools receive Pell Grants, but the numbers have been declining in recent years.

At community colleges, 38.6 percent of students received Pell Grants last year, down from 65 percent in the 2011-2012 academic year.

At technical colleges, more than half of all students, 55.2 percent, received Pell Grants, down from 65 percent two years earlier.

But while the value of those grants has been declining, financial aid officers told the Regents that the federal regulations governing them have become infinitely more complex.

Ben Kohl, assistant director of financial aid at Kansas State University, laid a copy of the manual he uses in processing applications and held a ruler next to it to show it was more than 6 inches thick — more than twice the size of the manual 10 years ago.

Nationwide, as financial aid has not kept pace with the rising cost of inflation, more students have had to take out student loans to pay for college, raising concerns about the volume of debt they take with them when they graduate and enter the workforce.

But Tompkins said he doesn’t think overall student debt has reached crisis proportions in Kansas, at least not yet.

“I couldn’t call it totally critical now, about student debt,” Tompkins said. “But I do think it’s something we’ve got to keep monitoring.