Funding Pell Grants: Creating a Safer Society
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY — Every year the cost of higher education grows higher. As it rises, post secondary education becomes more and more unattainable for many Americans. At the same time, post secondary education is becoming ever more important. Anthony Carnevale and Nicole Smith found that 66 percent of all jobs in the United States require some form of post secondary education or training. As the cost of education rises more students are looking to Pell Grants to help fund their education.
Pell Grants are federal grants, up to $5,920, that are given to low-income undergraduate students to help them finance their college educations. On average, students who qualify for a Pell Grant have a family income below 50 thousand dollars.
Without access to Pell Grants, higher educational opportunities are unattainable for many individuals. Soon more people might not have access to Pell Grants because the Trump administration has proposed cutting about four billion dollars from the Pell Grant program. This amount alone could fund Pell Grants for every student from North Carolina and Texas for an entire year.
President Trump’s attitude towards the Pell Grant program is very different than that of the previous president, Barack Obama, because increasing Pell Grant awards was a priority for Obama during his first term in office.
During the 2014–2015 school year, over eight million students received Pell Grants. This is a significant increase since the program’s creation in 1972. The money these students received from Pell Grants was crucial in most of their abilities to afford and attend college. Trump’s proposed budget cuts would decrease spending on Pell Grants and limit some students’ ability to attend college.
Megan McClean, a policy analyst for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), described Pell grants as being “the cornerstone program of federal student aid” and “the [program] focused on access and need.”
Black families would be especially hard hit by the proposed cuts to Pell Grants. On average, these families have incomes that are 60 percent of the income of white families, and most African-American families cannot afford to send their children to college without financial assistance. According to an article from the Fall 2009 The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the most important federal program for helping low income black students afford college is the Pell Grant program.
Pell Grants not only help students afford higher education but they help students graduate. Ray Franke, Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston, found that need-based grants such as Pell Grants increase students’ chances of graduating from college within six years and that unsubsidized federal loans lower students’ chances of obtaining a degree. If Trump’s budget cuts go into effect, students who once would have been able to receive Pell Grants might instead have to take out unsubsidized loans, thus decreasing their chances of graduating.
Education is important for individuals to improve their social class and succeed in society. “Education has been the path to better opportunity for generations of American strivers,” said Deval Patrick, a two-term governor of Massachusetts.
The current budget cuts Trump has proposed for Pell Grants would not immediately affect students because there is a projected roughly 10.6 billion dollar surplus in the program for 2017. This surplus has taken years to build and, according to the Center for American Progress, it “exists to protect the program from additional cuts if costs suddenly spike due to unexpected enrollment increases, for example, during a recession.” If Trump’s budget cuts go into effect and the economy weakens — increasing demand for Pell Grants — the program could see a shortfall sooner.
In the past, higher education was seen as public good. The “government would invest in your education because they knew investing in your education would produce a better society. [Ronald] Reagan promoted the idea that higher education is a private good. Why should we be subsidizing that? So we started slowly but shortly taking away the funding that would be subsidizing that,” said Angel Perez, Vice President for Enrollment and Student Success at Trinity College.
As a country we should be interested in continuing to make education affordable and should consider looking at education again as a public good because many studies, including one by Stephen Machin, Oliver Marie and Sunčica Vujić, in The Economic Journal, have found that education can yield significant social benefits and reduce crime.
“I think the government needs to find some way to show its commitment to Higher Education,” said Perez. One way to do this and in order to keep making education affordable and attainable for many Americans, while also reducing crime, is for the government to continue to fund the Pell Grant program. Congress should not approve Trump’s budget cuts. Without these grants many people will likely not be able to afford higher education, and in our society access to education is a key for social mobility.