Pell Grants are, and have been, critically important tools in making higher education a possibility for lower- and middle-income students.
Given the best of all possible worlds, I would make a few changes. I would place emphasis on increasing the amount of funding that goes into programs like Pell Grants, that purely and simply award funds to students who really cannot afford full tuition.
Funding and maintaining programs from Head Start to Pell Grants must be a high priority.
The Republicans claim they are for strengthening Pell grants when the truth is that over the last four years, their legislation has done the exact opposite.
In my family, there was one cardinal priority - education. College was not an option; it was mandatory. So even though we didn’t have a lot of money, we made it work. I signed up for financial aid, Pell Grants, work study, anything I could.
The Pell Grant is more than a financial aid program for college students in need. It is the right thing to do for America's college students, and it is the right thing to do for America's economy.
There's a true schizophrenia where if you say to voters, you know, do you think the federal government spends too much money and they should spend less, they say yeah, absolutely. Then you name specific things, like Pell grants for students and they say, no, not that. How 'bout NIH, medical research funding? Nah, you really shouldn't cut that. And pretty soon you've proved that what the American public is against is arithmetic.
I grew up with a single mom who was a waitress. We were on food stamps. My mom then got Pell Grants, put herself through college to get a degree to get a better job. Because we were broke, I then had to go to a state school. I went to Temple University, and had to get loans. So I grew up in a world where I saw the government helping individuals pull themselves up, and saw it work very successfully.
We spent $100 billion on education, saving the education system 300,000 teachers who were laid off because of the recession. We also put tens of thousands of lower income kids in college through Pell grants which has fundamentally all their opportunity. We did the same thing with regard to what we did on transportation. So we weren't just trying to - we knew we had to do something big to keep us from going over the cliff into a depression and pull us out of hole.
Sometimes I wonder how much of these debates have to do with the desire, the legitimate desire, for that history to be recognized. Because there is a psychic power to the recognition that is not satisfied with a universal program, it's not satisfied by the Affordable Care Act, or an expansion of Pell grants, or an expansion of the earned-income tax credit.
While millions of American families, including mine and yours, were working hard paying our fair share, it seems Donald Trump was contributing nothing to our nation. Imagine that. Not fair. Nothing for Pell grants to help kids go to college. Nothing for veterans. Nothing for our military.
I left school December of 1988. I was 21 at the time. And I hadn't quite finished my degree because I had done eight semesters, not understanding that I was going to have to finish the degree without the TAPP and Pell grant money that I had been using towards paying for much of my college tuition. And I didn't have any money. So I said, "Alright." And circumstances there were such that I thought it was maybe time to move on anyway.
or simply:
