This Week in The 21st Century America Project
Today, as analysts pore over President Obama's budget proposal, Millennial Generation activists are focusing on what his proposal means for students. According to a write-up by Reuters:
President Barack Obama's proposed budget for the next fiscal year nips and tucks at individual grants for low-income students but the amount budgeted is twice as high as two years ago because the number of students has grown.
One tuck is a decision to end the year-round Pell which allows students to collect two grants in a calendar year if they attend summer school, which is most likely to be felt by for-profit schools, according to one analyst.
The other tuck is the elimination of interest subsidies for loans to graduate students.
The maximum award for a Pell grant remains $5,550, which more than nine million students expected to benefit from as part of the program.
The New York Time's David Leonhardt delves into the Pell provisions, writing:
When the Pell program recently expanded to include grants for summer classes, the additional cost was not supposed to be very large - roughly 1 percent of Pell's annual $30 billion cost in future years. Instead, many more students than expected have signed up for the program and are receiving federal grants for summer classes. In 2013, summer grants are projected to make up $5 billion of the program's total $36 billion budget - or a whopping 14 percent.
In my earlier post, I asked for evidence that the summer grants did not help lift graduation rates. The administration official preferred to ask a different question: What evidence exists that summer grants, which began last year, have lifted graduation rates? Or, as the official put it, "Is the evidence adequate to justify a $5 billion new entitas lement?"
The administration decided that the answer was no and that eliminating the program was the kind of budget cut that the government should be making, given the deficit. One reason to be skeptical that summer grants are making a big difference is that enrollment in summer classes has risen only marginally in the last year.
By contrast, the Republican plan would offer even sharper cuts. Nick Anderson at The Washington Post writes:
House Republicans would lower the maximum Pell grant to $4,705 and cut other education spending by $4.9 billion, according to their spending proposal for the rest of the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
This narrow but important conversation about educational grants brings into focus an even larger and long over-due conversation about unemployment among young Americans. University of Massachusetts Amherst Economics Professor Nancy Folbre explores this issue on today's New York Times Economix blog. As she writes,
Neither lofty rhetoric surrounding a new "competitiveness agenda" nor bipartisan invocations of the importance of public investments in human capital can conceal the emerging reality.
Apart from the American Opportunity Tax Credit and modest increases in financial aid, public policy is not doing much to help young people from moderate- and low-income families who can't find a job or afford the education they need to improve their chances of finding one.
When last reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August, unemployment among those aged 16 to 24 was about 19 percent - unchanged from the previous year. Partly as a result, community college enrollments, already on an upward trend, have grown in the last two years. However, state budgets, already groaning under fiscal pressure, have been unable to provide additional support.
As voters - particularly Millennial voters - begin to compare and contrast the budget proposals, this underlying question about investment in the largest generation in American history offers a stark contrast between the two parties.
