A huge piece of legislation will pass the U.S. House of Representatives today – the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 (H.R. 3221). You can check out the great aspects of the bill by clicking here.
Here’s the short version: the bill will reform the financial aid system by increasing the maximum Pell Grant scholarship award to $5,500 in 2010 and to $6,900 by 2019 and linking it to match cost of living increases. It lowers interest rates on need-based federal student loans. It simplifies the FAFSA form to make it easier to apply for federal student aid. It expands access to low-cost Perkins loans.
The bill invests in community colleges and college-readiness programs. And it ends a ridiculous policy that gives banks wasteful subsidies on student loans and use the savings — as much as $87 billion over 10 years — to help students pay for college. This bill is a huge step forward to make college affordable and accessible. On to the Senate!
UPDATE: The House passed SAFRA (that’s what the insiders call it!) by a vote of 253 to 171. Find out how your Congresspersonage voted here: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/roll719.xml.
Tags: Congress, financial aid, student loans
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Thomas Bates Bio: Thomas is Rock the Vote's Vice President of Civic Engagement. @BatesThomas Email the author at: blog(at)rockthevote.com |
I’m thirty two now and recently enrolled to go back to college. I’ve been looking forward to this act for quite awhile. This is truely the catalysis that will turn this nation around. Far more effective investment in our economy and in our nation’s future. The financial section will come around but not without proper covenant.
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This bill is nothing but a cookie tossed in the direction of young voters while the government takes the rest of the jar away. The choices and competition that are to available to students today are entirely eradicated with the establishment of a new government program that will now have exclusive rights to provide student financial aid. It’s too bad that no one at Rock the Vote (a group supposedly advocating for policies that reflect what is good for our country’s young people) doesn’t even make a token effort to explain the substantial problems with this bill.
Democrats relying on the financial crisis to pass this bill are simply being dishonest. They’ve been trying to pass this legislation for years and are just playing on the fears and emotions of the public in order to advance their agenda. The current system, which provides needed aid to millions of students and which over 4,400 schools utilize, could maybe use some reform, but a government takeover of yet another area of our economy is certainly not the answer. Not to mention the fact that a number of universities have come out strongly against this new government monopoly and that over 27,000 people who work for the companies currently providing loan will lose their jobs.
Yet again, more of the same “if the government is doing it, it must be good” cheerleading from this supposedly “non-partisan” (what a joke) organization. Hopefully this terrible bill will be filibustered in the Senate.
The bill creates a new position, the “Green Colleges Czar”, whose job is to push colleges to become more environmentally conscious. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that once the government is controlling the purse strings, colleges that are less than enthusiastic about adopting the government’s agenda might be nudged (read blackmailed) into doing so by threats of reduced financial awards, etc.
Furthermore, anyone who has dealt with the government in the area of financial aid can tell you that the government-run loan programs are, like every other government-run program, an absolute nightmare to deal with. Why in the world you would want to completely shut out the private sector is completely beyond me, unless you consider government programs to be the model of efficiency.
And on a closing note, it is absolutely hilarious how you think the savings the Democrats detail in this bill are going to materialize. I would use the word naive, but that would be an understatement akin to calling the planet Jupiter big.
hurf durf the government is out to get me and when i ask them for money there’s too much paperwork
it’s a nightmaaaaare
and this food is disgusting and why are the portions so small