SgtMeowenstein
Rookie
- Feb 2, 2011
- 627
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- Banned
- #1
I know that to people other than rabid right-wingers this will come as no surprise, but I thought I'd point it out. Yet another reason not to trust Republicans.
Rep. Denny Rehberg: Pell Grants Are Becoming 'The Welfare Of The 21st Century'
WASHINGTON -- Pell Grants are the nation's largest financial aid program, providing low-income students with grants to help pay for the rising cost of attending college. But the cost of the program is also growing rapidly, set to exceed $40 billion for the 2012 fiscal year.
Some lawmakers have been exploring ways to reducing the costs of the programs by lowering the maximum grant size -- which is currently $5,550 -- or somehow restricting eligibility. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, Education that deals with the program, has examined whether there are ways to tie the grants to achievement or graduation rates.
In a radio interview on Friday, he compared Pell Grants to "welfare" and decried the fact that students who receive them don't have any sort of graduation requirement and could go straight from the education grant to "food stamps."
"So you can go to college on Pell Grants -- maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it’s turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century," said Rehberg in an interview with Blog Talk Radio. "You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy assistance, section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don’t have to graduate from college. And there ought to be some kind of commitment and endgame."
Rehberg added under the federal program, a student could "go to school for nine years on Pell Grants and you don’t even have to get a degree."