The Obama Administration’s Disappearing College Graduation Agenda
They say that everything’s relative, and this is certainly true in politics. Normally, the President signing a bill eliminating $87 billion in corporate student loan welfare would be a huge deal. But when it happens in the same legislation that overhauls the entire American health care system, people take less notice. And the successful student loan reform, in turn, overshadowed the collapse of the Obama Administration’s college graduation agenda. That’s the subject of an article I wrote this week for The New Republic.
In a nutshell, the student loan reform was more a triumph of good government than an improvement in education policy. Cutting out for-profit banks as the middlemen in the federal student loan program was a huge achievement. But nearly half of the savings were either defined into non-existence by Kent Conrad (the article explains how this happened) or targeted for health care and deficit reduction. Most of the remaining funds were used to increase Pell grants.
I’m all in favor of Pell grants. But when the administration boasts of doubling “the amount of funding available for Pell Grants” it’s important to realize that this doesn’t mean that the poorest students are getting twice as much money to pay for