With the stroke of a pen today, President Obama sealed a hard-fought victory for students. The Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act was signed into law this morning at the Northern Virginia Community College, Alexandria Campus. Simply stated, today our country chose to invest in college students over bank profits. Nice.
The law ends wasteful subsidies to private lenders and directs over sixty billion dollars of savings into financial aid programs – like the Pell grants program, the cornerstone financial aid program that allows low-income students to attend college every year. It also invests billions of dollars in community colleges and minority-Serving Institutions.
We can’t overstate what a battle this was for students versus the banks. As our friends at Campus Progress figured out:
The lending industry is no stranger to Capitol Hill. Since 1999, the industry as a whole has spent at least $62,567,134 lobbying Congress on everything from changing interest rates on student loan consolidation to protecting their federal subsidies. If, as an industry, they decided to help students instead of lobbying (usually against [students'] interests), they could have forgiven the loans of 2,696 borrowers (at the average level for 2008 graduates), provided grants of equal size to the 2009-2010 maximum Pell grant to 11,694 students, or reduced monthly loan payments by $100 for 52,139 struggling borrowers for a year.
Rock the Vote was at the signing ceremony. Brass band. Al Franken. Student leaders. Cabinet Secretaries. We had it all. Here are some pictures from the balcony:
An image from the balcony of the President's bill signing.
