In the year since her turn at the task ended, Margaret Spellings has watched with great interest as a Democratic administration tried its hand at finding money for higher education during a time of economic hardship.
And on Thursday, as Democrats finally succeeded in pumping $36-billion into the Pell Grant program by removing private companies from the government’s student-loan system, the former education secretary said that she supports the result, if not the method. She also backs President Obama’s vision of using that money to help make the United States the global leader in college-completion rates.
At that point, however, some differences emerge, ones that suggest areas in which Democrats might find future political opposition on federal aid policy now that the battle over the role of private loan companies has ended.
Concerns About College Readiness
Pell Grants should be expanded, Ms. Spellings said in an interview at the office of the lobbying and consulting firm she opened here after leaving government service. The maximum Pell Grant is scheduled to reach $5,550 in the 2010-11 academic year, and under the bill approved Thursday by Congress, it will remain at that level for two more years before increasing annually by the rate of inflation for the following five years.
The maximum Pell Grant was $5,350 for 2009-10, and its increase from $4,310 in 2007-8 during the Bush administration represented the biggest percentage increase over a two-year period since 1977-78 to 1979-80, and the biggest increase by dollars since the program was created in 1974-75, according to the College Board. But, Ms. Spellings said, such increases should be accompanied by assurances that the money is going to college-ready high-school graduates.
“This idea that that’s the way we do it now—that we take kids who are not capable of doing college work and give them money so they can do it—who’s for that? Nobody. That’s stupid,” the former secretary said.
Ms. Spellings said she was particularly dismayed by the Obama administration’s abandonment of a pair of grant programs for low-income students—Academic Competitiveness Grants and Smart Grants—that the Bush administration created with Democratic support.
The two programs provide low-income students with additional federal aid beyond the Pell Grant, if they perform well at the high-school and college levels. In the case of Smart Grants, recipients must also major in specific subjects, such as engineering, science, mathematics, or certain foreign languages.
But the grant programs have not met participation goals, and their strict eligibility requirements have put new burdens on financial-aid officials.
As secretary, Ms. Spellings had complained that not enough high schools were teaching students the necessary courses to qualify for the grants. The department’s own inspector general said the department wasn’t working hard enough to promote the grants and help schools understand them. Either way, the Obama administration proposed eliminating them in its budget request for the 2011 fiscal year.
An Abandoned ‘Solution’
The programs were “administratively burdensome, granted,” Ms. Spellings said. Their failure, however, “frankly was a testament to how broken the interface is between high schools and colleges,” she said. And now the Obama administration appears to be saying: “Let’s get rid of the solution because we can’t fix the problem,” she said.
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said the concept behind the grants was good, and it’s “a shame” that the programs weren’t better structured.
There might be future movement in Congress for revisiting the idea, he said, though probably not any time soon, given that lawmakers just finished working on the student-aid bill this year and in 2008 completed an extensive reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
It’s also unlikely that Congress would make an extensive connection between academic achievement and eligibility for federal grant money, Mr. Hartle said. “The federal government has considered that in the past,” he said, “and never wanted to do it.”
Ms. Spellings also provoked colleges during her tenure, forming her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which faulted institutions for not working harder to make themselves more affordable and more responsive to the nation’s economic needs.
She’s not backing off that message, though she acknowledges she may have delivered it more bluntly than colleges were ready to accept it at the time.
“I don’t know if it was fear, but I think it was a shot across the bow,” the former secretary said. “The thing about this topic is it makes complete and total sense to folks and to consumers.”