Here’s $100 for College. And by the Way, We’re Cutting Your Student Aid

by Tula Connell, Jun 12, 2006

The extremist Republican congressional subterfuge machine is at it again. (Does it ever stop?)

Here’s the latest. Congressional Republicans are tooting their horns about voting for a $100-per-student increase in the amount available for Pell Grants, the federal financial aid program for students with family incomes up to $45,000.

Raising the individual grant sounds good―and it is good. But what the Republican-led Congress is not announcing is that the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies recently voted to cut overall funds for Pell for fiscal year 2007. That means fewer students will get financial aid or more people will get less money, as a smaller pool of money is spread over a larger pool of applicants.

The bill would set the overall Pell Grant funding at about $13 billion, a slight decrease from a year ago but a modest increase from what Bush’s budget proposes.
 
The Free Exchange on Campus blog, which is supported in part by the nation’s two largest teachers unions, the AFT and the National Education Association (NEA), has this to say about the reality behind the Republicans’ latest smoke-and-mirrors maneuver:

It means that the Republican leadership is trying to get press coverage for “raising” the Pell grants by raising the maximum grant allowed, while simultaneously cutting the total amount going to Pell grants….In other words, the key information here is not that the leadership made some token commitment to raising the maximum grant, but rather that the subcommittee CUT the total appropriations for Pell grants.

Meanwhile, college students and their families are just a few weeks away from seeing their student loan costs jump by hundreds to thousands of dollars. A few months ago, Congress passed a bill that made the biggest cuts in federal student loan program history—$12 billion. Beginning July 1, interest rates for most loan programs will increase by 1 to 2 percentage points, to a maximum of 8.5 percent.
 
To help working families compute how much deeper the Republican change puts them in the hole each month, the Democrats on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce have created an online “Student Loan Calculator.” The money the interest rate hikes generate will help pay for Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy.

According to NEA, since the Pell Grants were launched 40 years ago, they have enabled millions of disadvantaged students, most of them first-generation college students, to attend post-secondary institutions and earn degrees. In fact, most Pell awards go to students with family incomes below $20,000.

Now, however, increasing student debt is preventing many young people from obtaining higher-education degrees. Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) writes in the Arizona Daily Star: 

Rising student debt will prevent at least 2 million potential future graduates from attaining a degree. A recent report issued by the State Public Interest Research Group’s Higher Education Project concluded that an astounding 38 percent of private college graduates and 23 percent of all four-year public college graduates would face unmanageable student loan payments if they choose to become a teacher or pursue other public interest fields.

Caps on federal student loans have forced students to seek private loans, which were up from $1.1 billion in 1995–96 to $10.6 billion in 2003–04, according to CampusWatch, a project of the Center for American Progress. These loans have much higher, often predatory, interest rates.

On average, students are $19,000 in debt when they graduate. Among those asked if they were living “paycheck to paycheck” in a recent survey by AllianceBernstein, 42 percent of graduates with debt said that described them “very well,” while only 24 percent of those who graduated without debt said so. More than one-third (34 percent) of those with college debt reported having sold personal possessions such as furniture, clothing and CDs to make ends meet, compared with just 17 percent of the debt-free.

As part of a feature on growing U.S. debt (on the national and individual levels), The New York Times Sunday magazine included an article on the potential ramifications of student debt on highly skilled, and greatly needed, fields such as medical research. More medical graduates are choosing private practice, rather than lower-paying research, because of high student debt.

The nation’s growing education gap is decried by those on either side of the political divide. Conservative columnist David Brooks writes: 

In the 1970’s, when the information age was young, kids from poorer, less educated families were catching up to kids from more affluent families when it came to earning college degrees. But now the gap between rich and poor is widening. Students in the poorest quarter of the population have an 8.6 percent chance of getting a college degree. Students in the top quarter have a 74.9 percent chance.

As Congress debates cutting back Pell Grants and shortchanging low-income young people, it should keep in mind that if we can’t agree on ensuring the future of our nation, on what can we agree?  

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