Working on federal policy and keeping your wits about you requires a pretty high tolerance for cognitive dissonance and general b.s. But I’m having a really hard time wrapping my head around this: In September 2009, the House of Representatives passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, or SAFRA. The bill was designed to [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Pell Grants'
Senator Lamar Alexander is Making Things Up
With the prospect of President Obama’s student loan bill passing through the budget reconciliation bill fast approaching, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) took to the Washington Post op-ed page to tell some lies about the bill. Alexander, who used to be the Secretary of Education and knows better, said:
Starting in July, all 19 million students who want [...]
How Pell Will Avoid the Freeze
Last week, we had a couple of posts talking about how the Obama administration’s proposal to freeze most non-defense discretionary spending for three years could create trouble for Pell Grants, which often have costs that are hard to accurately estimate. But despite these initial fears, senior administration officials promised last week that Pell Grants would [...]
A Nice Borrower Win, Potential Pell Problems in Proposed SOTU Ideas
Details of the policy proposals President Obama intends to outline in tomorrow’s State of the Union are starting to leak out and it’s looking like a bit of a mixed bag on education.
On the good side is the proposed expansion of Income-Based Repayment (IBR).This program, which has been available to federal student loan borrowers since [...]
Don’t Let Colleges Off the Hook with Net Price
As Kevin noted yesterday, the College Board’s Trends in College Pricing 2009 yet again shows significant percentage and absolute increases in tuition and fees in every higher education sector for this year. Regardless of how you spin it, college price is still going up while almost every other indicator for consumers plummets.
That is, unless you [...]
Steal These FAFSA Ideas!
We’ve long known that the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is complex and that this complexity has consequences in college attendance. The 2008 FAFSA, for example, was four times longer than the basic IRS tax form. For many low-information families, this complexity matters. Hundreds of thousands of students eligible for financial aid never [...]
Why CBO Says Pell Grants Will Cost More
A few weeks ago, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its mid-session review, a document that updates certain budgetary information from its spring estimates. While review mainly concerns macroeconomic budget matters, it did contain a significant increase in the projected cost of the president’s proposal to fund all Pell Grants as a mandatory [...]
2010 Budget
The Department of Education today released its 2010 budget. You can read the full thing or check out Alyson Klein’s first look. Things that I noticed:
the budget shifts money around reading and early childhood. It would cut Reading First state grants and Even Start while creating two new programs called “Title I early childhood grants” [...]
Goldilocks and Pell Grants
It’s hard to make everyone happy on federal financial aid. Postsecondary institutions and state legislators decry the declining value of the Pell Grant over time. They’re right; it does buy less than it used to. But, federal legislators argue the Pell, the primary vehicle for student aid for low-income students, has been regularly increased and [...]
Making Pell Mandatory
President Obama’s budget proposal included several major changes in student financial aid, including a proposal for the biggest change in the federal student loan system since its inception. People on either side of the student loan issue can debate the pro’s and con’s of the President’s proposal to end subsidies to private lenders – and [...]
Uncomfortable Truths
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has recently launched an initiative to leap toward a tuition model that involves greater degrees of price discrimination. It plans to increase tuition significantly, capitalize on those students who can pay the higher costs, and re-distribute excess money to low-income students. It’s a bad idea for a variety of reasons (read [...]
Time to Take a Stand
President Obama’s Access and Completion Incentive Fund, which will help large numbers of low-income students graduate from college, is part of a larger package of reforms including the elimination of the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL)—that is, the program in which the federal government guarantees and subsidizes student loans made by banks and other [...]
Government Autopilot
President Obama’s budget is out (.pdf), and the first thing that strikes me as entirely sensible is indexing to inflation some of our established tax and spending programs. Instead of arguing eternally over whether or by how much federal Pell Grants should be expanded, they would now automatically rise with the Consumer Price Index (plus [...]
No Cheese for You
Last week, the New York Times reported on the particularly hard hit historically black colleges and universities (HBCU’s) are taking in the current economic downturn. As the article notes, these institutions serve, often as a central part of their mission, a disproportionately large number of low-income students who are the first in their family to [...]
Don’t Waiver
The National Governors Association lobbied hard against the “maintenance of effort” provision included in the recent Higher Education Act reauthorization. It should come as no surprise then that the NGA has already asked for an across-the-board waiver, citing the recent economic crisis and expected state government shortfall. The law does include a waiver provision for, [...]
Words from Vowell
Sarah Vowell offers a paeon to Pell Grants:
I paid my way through Montana State University with student loans, a minimum-wage job making sandwiches at a joint called the Pickle Barrel, and — here come the waterworks — Pell Grants. Thanks to Pell Grants, I had to work only 30 hours a week up to my [...]
Casting Blame
Richard DiFeliciantonio, who is the vice president for enrollment at Ursinus College, and who if I’m not mistaken put out a very popular cover of “Light My Fire” back in the day, wrote an op-ed($) in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week decrying “America’s Damaging Lack of Investment of Higher Education.” As evidence, he [...]
Accreditation Explains Everything
InsideHigherEd reports a new flare-up in an ongoing dispute about the way the U.S. Department of Education regulates people who regulate colleges. Yes, this sounds very boring. It’s not; it actually explains much about higher education as well as school vouchers and other hot-button K-12 issues. But first, a little history:
For a long time the [...]
Fact Check
The New York Times, April 20, 2008:
The number of low-income students at top institutions is still fairly low but is growing. The share of Harvard undergraduates receiving Pell grants rose to 13 percent this year, from 10 percent in 2003-4. At Amherst, over the same span, the number has risen to 18 percent from 15 [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.