On Friday, President Bush announced an increase to fund Pell Grants, which according to the Education Department's Web site, provide need-based grants to low-income undergraduate students. According to an article in The Washington Post on Friday, the grant is given to 5.3 million students each year, who have a family income of less than $40,000 per year.
The increase will include raising the maximum grant from $4,050 to $4,310, however, Senate Democrats wanted to raise it to $5,100. According to the Post, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said this increase will help those families already receiving the grant as college tuition continues to rise. This is great, except Bush has not mentioned where he is going to get the money to pay for this increase. If he takes it away from different financial aid programs, it could hinder financial aid for other students in other federal grant or loan programs. If Bush wanted to help make college more affordable, he would help the leaders in Congress who are pushing legislation to stabilize college tuition.
This increase, while it will help some students, also comes after a cut in 2004, in which Bush cut about 90,000 students from the Pell Grant program, according to a December 2004 report by CNN. This new measure will only increase the amount of money each student can receive, it will not change the standards to include more students into the program.
He should never have cut so many students from the program, and an increase in funding per person does not help the thousands of students who were cut from it. We believe such a cut should have been accompanied with a tuition cap for public universities because students cut from the program were not only faced with covering the cost previously paid for by the Pell Grant, but also a tuition increase from the previous year.
Also mentioned in the Post article was that 30 years ago, Pell Grants covered about 60 percent of the cost of a four-year public university. In 2006, it covered about one-third of the cost. Increasing the amount of money each student receiving a Pell Grant can get will not be a bandage for the problem of high tuition costs. Not only does the president need to work with the Democrats in Congress who want to stop tuition increases, but state governments also need to work to stop higher education institutions from making a college education completely unaffordable for the lower and middle classes.
As The Lantern reported on Jan. 18, the University of Toledo will not be increasing tuition for its upcoming semester. We encourage OSU to set an example like this for the rest of the public universities in Ohio, and the federal and state governments to set a standard for tuition increases.
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