Chris Dodd for President

Yesterday Senator Dodd spoke about the need to help American families afford paying for college education on the floor of the Senate. Dodd was speaking in support of the Higher Education Access Act. The Higher Education Access Act boosts student financial aid for college by $17.4 billion over the next five years. The bill will raise the maximum annual Pell grant from $4,300 to $5,400 and make it easier for students to repay federally backed student loans by capping payments at 15% of discretionary income. The bill also includes additional loan-forgiveness for public servants such as teachers and police officers. I want to draw out the section on Pell Grants Senator Dodd's statements on the floor yesterday. From the congressional record:

One of the items contained in this bill that I am most happy about is the increase in the Pell grant. I have been involved in this for many years. It has been terribly frustrating over the last 6, 7, 8 years to watch how little this administration is willing to support even modest increases to the Pell Grant Program in our country. The Pell grant in this bill will be raised to $5,100, in 2008 and up to $5,400 by the year 2012. Frankly, that is paltry. Candidly, I wish it were much higher, especially considering what a Pell grant used to provide only a few short years ago toward the cost of a public education. The grant used to cover 80 percent of the average tuition, fees, room and board at a public university. Today the Pell grant covers 29 percent. So even with a Pell grant you are still looking at having to come up with roughly 70 percent of the additional costs of that higher education when you take all of these factors together. As a result, low- to middle-income students who attend college are forced to finance their education with an ever-increasing percentage of loans, including private loans. This increase in the debt burden of students, in some cases, keeps them from going to college at all. As I mentioned the numbers earlier, somewhere close to 400,000 students are not going on to higher education because of financial burdens. This year alone, it is estimated that 400,000 high school graduates who are prepared and ready to go to a 4-year college will be unable to go because their families cannot afford it. While I continue to advocate for even greater increases in the Pell grant, I commend my colleagues for taking the first steps in getting us back to the 80-percent tuition coverage we achieved in 1975.