The Mammoth Pell Grant Program
The Chronicle published a forum on Pell Grants this week, along with my new column on the same subject. We’ve clearly reached a point where the rapidly growing cost of Pell ($44-billion in FY 2012 according to OMB, although I doubt Congress will actually appropriate that much) can’t be ignored. Once tax credits, loan subsidies, and other aid programs are added in, general federal subsidies for higher education are starting to approach total state subsidies for higher education (there’s no real economic difference between directly writing public universities a check to keep average tuition below market prices and giving students a voucher to hand to colleges to keep their individual tuition below market prices). A commensurate shift in policy authority can and should follow, and I think