It appeared earlier this year that Congress was taking great strides in increasing need-based aid for college students.
But partisan squabbling has blocked efforts to fund Pell Grants at higher levels and to raise the maximum amount the grants can be funded at, resulting in students losing out on about $170 for the 2009-2010 school year and even more in the long run.
The education budget to be considered by the House of Representatives allotted enough Pell Grant funding to provide $4,900 per student, up from the maximum $4,241 students can receive this upcoming school year. But political maneuvers resulted in the House Committee on Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) abandoning the appropriations process for the remainder of this year, which means this year’s funding levels can be continued but not altered for next year.
Obey’s opening statement in the markup session in late June expressed great interest in boosting need-based aid for college students. He said that of this year’s high school freshmen, 90 percent of white students will graduate in four years, but the rate drops to the 50s for minority students.
And as if those odds didn’t make it difficult enough for minorities to go to college, Obey described a bleak outlook for the cost of college. For families with the top 20 percent of family incomes, tuition eats up only about 5 percent of their income. But for families earning incomes in the lowest 20 percent, tuition consumes as much as 70 percent of the family’s income.
However, the markup took a surprising turn that all but eliminated the chances of a Pell Grant funding boost for the next fiscal year.
In response to soaring oil and gasoline prices, Republicans have hoped to lease more land to American oil companies, hoping that boosted domestic oil production will help lower prices. But Democrats have been staunchly opposed to more drilling, saying oil companies already have millions of acres of land they are not using.
During the House Appropriations Committee markup session to deal with funding for the Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education – through which Pell Grants are administered – Republicans commandeered the committee and shifted the focus from education to oil drilling. The ranking Republican member on the committee, Jerry Lewis (R- Calif.), had been pushing for the committee to look at funding for the Department of the Interior, to which Republicans wanted to attach a law allowing American oil companies to lease more land to drill in. After the education bill was introduced, Lewis offered an amendment that deleted all the language in the bill and substituted the Interior bill. Rather than considering the Interior bill, Obey quickly adjourned the markup and has said he has no intention of restarting the appropriation process again.
Compounding frustrations over lower-than-expected Pell grant levels is a failure in Congress to maintain momentum for the College Opportunity and Affordability Act. The bill headed to the full House floor in early November and passed in February despite objections from President George W. Bush.
But the bill – which would have allowed Congress to fund Pell Grants as high as $9,000 per student instead of the current $5,800 cap and would also have provided $2,000 in loan forgiveness each year for up to five years for graduates who enter public service – came to a grinding halt when it reached the Senate, where it has been sitting in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee since mid-February.
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