For a liberal, it’s hard to imagine a better set of obituaries than those written for former Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, who died on January 1st of this year. While everyone mentioned his patrician upbringing and quirky personality, and many noted his efforts to slow nuclear proliferation, Pell was best-remembered for Pell grants, the multi-billion dollar federal financial aid program that benefits low-income college students.  The first sentence of the Providence Journal’s obit described Pell as one who “championed better education of the poor;” the Washington Post headline was “Former R.I. Senator Claiborne Pell, 90; Sponsored Grant Program;” the Boston Globe led with “helped students go to college;” and the New York Times began by noting “the college grant program that bears his name.”

It says a lot about the way we think of college affordability that none of the obituaries noted the obvious: The Pell grant program hasn’t worked.

By that, I don’t mean, “it didn’t make a difference.” Obviously, Pell grant recipients are, all else equal, better off than they would be without Pell grants. Instead, I mean “it didn’t result in college becoming more affordable for low-income students.”

Consider: In 1980, the year Congress named the grants after Pell, in-state  tuition, room and board at a typical public four-year university cost $2,551. Pell grants provided $1,750. In 2009, public four-years cost $15,231. Pell grants provided $5,350. Of course, there’s been inflation over the last 29 years. $2,551 in 1980 is the equivalent of $6,923 in 2009. But that’s still thousands of dollars less than $9,881, which is the present-day difference between the cost of college ($15,231) and Pell grants ($5,350).

In other words, a low-income student without a Pell grant in 1980 was better off than a low-income student with a Pell grant today.

How did that happen? Simple: college got much more expensive, overwhelming the many billions of dollars poured into the Pell grant program, and then some. And the trend is accelerating. In round numbers, college prices increased annually at three percent above inflation in the 1980s, four percent above inflation in the 1990s, and five percent above inflation in the 2000s.

Yet people tend to treat this like some kind of inexorable naturally- occurring phenomenon, like boy bands or the phases of the moon, rather than a function of conscious choices by institutions and public policymakers, choices that could have been different in the past and should be different in the future.  The better analogy is global warming: yes, it’s big; yes, it’s long-term; yes, it’s difficult to fix; but no, we can’t ignore it because if we do it’s going to work out very badly for all of us in the end.

For more about what happened to diminish Pell’s legacy and what to do about it, see this article in the new issue of Democracy.