College student organizations across the nation led a campaign this week to convince their senators to support a bill that proposes larger Pell grants.
Raising Pell! Week of Action, an initiative hosted by the United States Student Association, Campus Progress and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, aims to amplify student support of the bill, especially through use of social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Students can send tweets to their senators through the association’s Web site.
“With over 1,000 calls made to senators’ offices, the student voice is certainly having an influence on lawmakers,” said USSA President Gregory Cendana. “Senator [John] Kerry’s office said they got so many calls that students should stop calling because he got the message.”
The legislation, proposed by U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Education & Labor, passed in the House of Representatives on Sept. 17.
The Senate version of the bill is being drafted in the Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, said USSA Legislative Director Angela Peoples.
The bill proposes an investment of $40 billion to increase the maximum annual Pell Grant scholarship to $5,550 in 2010 and $6,900 by 2019, according to the Committee on Education and Labor’s Web site. The bill will also strengthen the campus-based Perkins Loan program that provides low-cost federal loans to students.
All new federal loans would be converted to the Direct Loan program as of July 2010, instead of relying on lenders subsidized by taxpayers. Under the bill, interests rates on subsidized federal loans would be kept low by making them variable starting in 2012.
Without the bill, interest rates are set to jump from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent in 2012, according to the committee’s Web site.
Student support for the “Raising Pell!” campaign spans 12 to 15 states, Peoples said.
“[Students] are excited about the monumental piece of education reform and are committed to organizing until the Senate passes a student aid reform bill that has similar components of the House version,” Cendana said.
Although there is no definite time frame for the completion of the bill, it is expected to be introduced in the next couple of weeks, said Pedro de la Torre, advocacy senior associate of Campus Progress.
“Congress has a lot on its plate right now because of the health care debate,” de la Torre said. “Hopefully by November, we’ll see some major movement on the Pell grant bill, though. The main challenge is making sure that [the bill] doesn’t change with amendments that might be harmful to students.”
4 comments
...this just goes to prove your idiocracy...
maybe you should have worked harder to get academic scholarships so your "middle class family" doesn't have to pay your costs. Get a job, loans, work on getting scholarships, and get over it like the rest of us having to pay for college as well. My family helps with my college cost as well as the academic scholarships I worked hard to be awarded. I am all for helping people better themselves, we are paying AIG execs bonuses so lets put kids through school! Stop being a hater all your life! Please take your raunchy attitude elsewhere.