The budget bill that House Republicans passed early Thursday funds tax cuts for the rich by kneecapping Medicaid, slashing food stamps, and gutting green energy investments—while also adding trillions to the deficit. But Republicans aren’t content simply to take away health care and nutrition assistance from millions of Americans while accelerating climate change. The bill will also disproportionately hurt low-income students by making it harder for them to borrow and repay their loans and by tightening the rules for Pell Grant recipients. In doing so, it takes an ax to one of the few reliable ladders for working-class people seeking higher education.
While there is some appetite for changes to the student loan program—total student debt is $1.6 trillion and growing, and more than five million borrowers are in default—they are not the ones that the Republican Congress has made. And no one was crying out for cuts to the Pell Grant program, a straightforward grant given to the lowest-income college students that doesn’t have to be repaid. But these provisions in the bill are consistent with Republicans’ broader attacks on higher education itself, which they consider to be corrupted by elitism and wokeism. Increasing the burden of student loans and tightening restrictions on Pell Grants, though, will only make it harder for working students to attend college. So much for the GOP’s reverence for meritocracy.
The changes to the Pell Grant program increase the number of credit hours that are required to qualify as a full-time student, from 12 to 15, and cut off aid entirely for students attending less than half-time. For most college programs, that effectively requires one additional class per semester to get the maximum loan, around five classes total, and amounts to an almost $1,500 cut for students taking 12 credit hours who can’t add to their course load. It would also entirely cut off an estimated 20 percent of students currently receiving aid. “It is a full-out assault on the ability of students—especially low-income students—to access and afford higher education,” Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education, told Inside Higher Ed last week. And it will only save the government an estimated $67 billion through the next decade, in a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will add $3.1 trillion to the deficit over that time period.
Advocates have said that the requirements are likely to hit the hardest for students who need to work or take care of a child while in college. “It just completely ignores the reality that the majority of these students are not able to take five courses because they’re also juggling the realities of life … working multiple part-time jobs just to get by,” said Aissa Canchola Banez, the policy director at the Student Borrower Protection Center, a nonprofit that wants to eliminate student debt.
The 50-year-old Pell Grant program was designed to enable the poorest students to attend school by providing them with tuition assistance they didn’t have to pay back. Today, most recipients come from families making less than $60,000 a year. Overall, the value of the amount provided has diminished over the years because the small increases lawmakers have made haven’t kept up with inflation, not to mention the much faster-rising costs of college. The grant once covered almost three-fourths of tuition and now only covers a little over a quarter.
As Pell Grants have decreased in value, students in need have relied more on student loans, both those provided by the government and those provided by private lenders. Student debt has more than doubled in this century, as more students have gone to college and college costs have soared. Defaults rose over that time period as well. Borrowers have already been struggling to pay back those loans, especially those who borrowed but didn’t finish to receive degrees, and the programs meant to help those in over their head weren’t working as designed. Former President Joe Biden forgave a record number of student loans, largely by removing administrative barriers to forgiveness under existing laws. But Biden’s biggest effort was blocked by the Supreme Court.
Advocates have rallied around free college tuition at state universities and community colleges and increased aid like Pell Grants to help tackle the student loan crisis and the college affordability crisis. But the fight over student loans has helped make higher education funding more generally a target for the right. Republicans used the student loan crisis as a justification for these cuts. “Our current student loan system is broken and has left students holding over $1.6 trillion in federal student loan debt, with taxpayers estimated to lose hundreds of billions of dollars on loans disbursed over the next decade,” GOP Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan said in a statement after the House Education and Workforce Committee passed the education cuts, adding that the bill “would save taxpayers over $350 billion” and “bring much-needed reform” of student loans.
It’s part and parcel with Republicans’ wholesale assault on higher education. The Trump administration has gone directly after many elite colleges and universities over their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and students’ pro-Palestinian protests. This bill will extend the fight to the state and community colleges that educate the vast majority of students in the U.S., particularly those from low-income and working-class families. Other efforts to cut government spending on higher education will also impede these institutions’ ability to step in and provide help to the students who need it who can no longer count on Pell Grants to help cover their costs.
Tying colleges and universities to the culture wars has helped stoke anti-elitism among the right. Republican voters are worried about the values colleges and universities teach and think these institutions hold too much sway over American culture, moving it too far left. This is especially true of older voters who presumably see their grandchildren in college and don’t know what to make of the generational gaps they see in political thinking. It’s led them to question not only what universities are teaching, but whether they hold value for society at all.
There are criticisms of higher education that are more than fair. The cost of college has gotten too far out of reach for many Americans, and for those who must borrow and struggle to earn a degree, their eventual earnings are often offset by unmanageable debt. The rise in student debt has also led many policymakers to question whether too many professional fields require unnecessary credentials. The push for high school students to go to college has been accompanied by a decline in apprenticeship programs and other alternative pathways into careers that provide high-earning opportunities in blue-collar work.
As the daughter of a plumber, I’m sympathetic to arguments that not everyone needs to go to college for a good, well-paying career. But that message seems most aimed at low-income students in poor communities, those who might benefit most from college and can afford it the least. Earlier in my career, I held a second job as a private tutor for SAT prep on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, and those parents and students were all scrambling to get into the best colleges possible, never once doubting the value or their ability to afford it. I never once heard someone suggest they forgo college for a blue-collar career.
Abandoning the idea that education can be an engine for social mobility would change the shape of the United States. And it’s become clear that funding for colleges has now simply become a wedge in the ongoing culture wars and battle for voters, as college graduates of all classes have migrated to the Democratic Party and non-college graduates are wooed by the MAGA Republicans’ faux populism. Needless to say, the cuts in the GOP bill were authored by congressmembers who not only attended college, but in many cases went to Ivy League schools and hold advanced degrees.
The bill still has to pass the Senate, where the Republican majority is also slim, and GOP senators including Rand Paul of Kentucky and Josh Hawley of Missouri have objected to some provisions. Whatever happens in the upper chamber, the Republican Party has shown us that it plans to use the worries of the working class to dismantle any government attempt to help them, even in the smallest ways.
