Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives
introduced a bill last Wednesday to reverse the changes made to the
Pell Grant eligibility formula instituted by the Bush
administration last month.
The president’s changes would affect thousands of U.S.
college students who depend on federal financial aid in the form of
Pell Grants, and the students may have to reduce their course load
in the coming academic year due to changes made to the Pell
eligibility formula on Dec. 23. Approximately 89,000 students
receiving Pell Grants will lose them altogether, and an additional
1.3 million students will see their aid reduced, according to the
American Council on Education.
Several democratic legislators introduced the bill to combat
what they saw as harmful changes. The legislation, which was
cosponsored by California Representative George Miller, the senior
Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and
introduced by Representatives Tim Bishop, D-N.Y., and Rush Holt,
D-N.J., would undo those changes.
The new formula introduced last month decreases the amount of
taxes deducted from the income of students and their families
because it uses a more recent set of state and federal tax data.
The result is a greater expected contribution amount from students
and their families.
The change to the formula “makes it look like families can
afford to pay more for college than they really can,” said
Tom Kiley, a spokesman for Miller. Kiley called the Bush
administration’s rules change a “rush job.”
“We want to come up with a long-term solution to the Pell
scholarship problem,” he said.
Miller accused Republicans of already having underfunded the
Pell Grant program, which is the principal source of federal
financial aid for college students from lower- and middle-income
families.
The cuts made to grant funding for these students are
“scaring a lot of families off from college,” Kiley
said.
“We want to prevent the Department of Education from
hurting students,” he said.
The Department of Education tried to make the same change to the
formula a year ago, but Congress passed legislation that postponed
the change until the 2005-2006 school year.
“We were successful in passing the same bill,” Kiley
said. But this year the legislation has encountered significantly
more opposition.
Supporters of the change to the formula say that it will benefit
the neediest students because it allows the Department of Education
to use the most recently available tax data.
“They were using, and had been using for 10 years, tax
data that goes back to 1988,” said Alexa Marrero, a
spokeswoman for the Committee on Education and the Workforce. By
updating the information used to calculate tax deductions, she
said, the Department of Education is better able to target
financial aid at students who need it most.
“Federal law requires the Department of Education to use
the best information available,” she said. “It’s
common sense.”
John Boehner, R-Ohio, chairman of the Committee on Education and
the Workforce and major proponent of the change, said in a
statement that “using outdated tax tables effectively cheats
the poorest students.”
The Department of Education is now able to use tax data from
2001, which “increases total federal Pell Grant funding to
its highest level in history,” according to Congressman
Boehner’s statement.
The new approach to the award will raise, not lower, the amount
of aid given to needy students, Marrero said.
“Overall, the funding for Pell Grants is going up by $400
million,” she said, which will allow 25,000 to 28,000 more
students to receive aid for the 2005-2006 academic year.
But these figures are misleading, Kiley said. The maximum amount
of the Pell scholarship is now $4,050, which is $800 less, in real
terms, than it was in 1975-1976.
In addition, the cost of attending college has continued to
increase, while the amount of the Pell Grant has remained
constant.
Kiley also said the tax data being used for the new formula is
from a year when the economy was not performing well. “The
economy (then) doesn’t reflect reality at all,” he
said.
The increase in the number of Pell Grants given reflects the
fact that more students are applying for aid because more students
need it, Kiley said.
“The reason why more students are getting Pell Grants is
because the economy’s not good,” he said.
“That’s not something to be proud of.”