My home state of West Virginia ranks number two in the Education Needs Index. Though normally I am pulling for the mountain state to be number one in all things, in this model the states ranked highest are “most critical” in their levels of under-education and economic problems like poverty and unemployment. Because of these challenges, students from West Virginia — and low-income students from all over the country — understand the critical importance of Pell Grants.
More than 9 million students in the United States depend on Pell Grants in order to go to college, and these students are disproportionately women and people of color. A 2009 report found that 60 percent of Pell recipients are women. Close to 40 percent of Latino students and 50 percent of black students receive the grants. In 2008–09, nearly half of all Pell Grant recipients came from families whose total income was less than $15,000 per year.
It will come as no surprise that when low-income students get need-based grants, their college enrollment rates increase, and their drop-out rates decrease. In other words, when you can pay for college, you go — and you stay.
This kind of data electrified the College Affordability Senate Briefing on July 15, an event I was lucky enough to attend as an AAUW intern. AAUW supports protection of the Pell Grant program and believes that reducing the deficit must be done without short-sighted cuts to critical programs that serve millions of women, families, children, seniors, and low-income students.
As the briefing drew to a close, Charles Reed, chancellor of the California State University System, posed a question that stayed with me in the days that followed. Reed acknowledged that yes, there is a finite pot of money for any budget and that hard choices have to be made. But at the end of the day, he asked, what kind of a country do we want to live in?
For me, the answer is clear: The country I want to live in does not solve its debt problems by yanking away opportunity from low-income students.
Today, July 25, has been designated by a broad coalition of education, social justice, youth, and women’s organizations as Save Pell Day. So I would like to argue that saving Pell Grants is, at heart, a moral issue. Cutting them means that a lot of kids from West Virginia — and from low-income neighborhoods all over the country — won’t be able to go to college, and we as a country will miss out on the vital contributions they could make to a future economy. When access to higher education is systemically tied to income rather than to ability and potential, we have a serious moral problem.
The country I want to live in does not scapegoat working-class students during a financial crisis. Rather, it does everything it can to support them.
This post was written by AAUW Public Policy Intern Layne Amerikaner.
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