Friday, November 30, 2012

Pell Grant Program Cut by One-Third?

The email, sent out by the Dallas County Community College District, informed students of the changes to the Pell Grant program. It revealed that the number of semesters a student could receive a Pell Grant had been cut from 18 semesters down to 12. It is a detail likely unknown to most students; in fact, the cut in grants has gone largely unreported by the media.

-from an article at Examiner.com entitled "College Students Learn of Obama's Secret Pell Grant Cuts."  (h/t Instapundit)

The slant of the article is that Obama is such a terrible person, because he "hid" this during his campaign.  (Obama is not an idiot.  Call him what you want, he is not an idiot.  Romney-Ryan were hardly forthcoming about what deductions they were going to eliminate in their proposed income tax program.)  But hasn't the right-wing been critical of the government for subsidizing higher education all along?  The problem with making the cuts in the Pell Grant program is that it is an outright grant program for financially needy students, not a loan program that weighs the down the young person with debt.  Cut back the loan program and higher education will have to cut back its high prices.  At least in that respect - forcing down prices - the Pell Grant program cuts might do some good.  I would start with the loan program, however, not with Pell Grants.

What this is really telling us, however, is that the slow motion bursting of the "higher-education" bubble continues, whoever we have in the White House.  The market, finally, will have its way.  And the market tells us that higher-education is terribly over-priced for what it is giving us back.  We will still get what is valuable from higher-education.  It is simply that it will be delivered differently and its substance will be transformed because subsidies of the entrenched educational establishment will be reduced.  At least that is my hope.  Thanks, Glenn Reynolds, for taking us to school on this issue.

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