Hope you haven't spent that stimulus money yet.

A compromise amendment worked out by moderate Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate late Friday slashed billions of dollars that would have flowed to colleges and universities in the Senate's original version, with the biggest cuts coming in education aid to states and funds to modernize college facilities.

To the relief of advocates for students, the compromise legislation sustained $13.9 billion to increase the maximum Pell Grant for needy students, which budget cutters had eyed. College and student lobbyists had worked aggressively late last week as various drafts of the compromise amendment emerged showing Pell funds in and out of the plan, but when Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) revealed the final plan's contents late Friday evening, Pell was in.

The one area important to higher education that seemed to benefit from the changes was biomedical research. The Senate compromise would provide $10 billion in new funds to the National Institutes of Health, mostly for scientific studies.

Senate leaders worked closely with the White House to craft the new version of the stimulus bill, which cut more than $100 billion out of a package that, when introduced in the Senate late last month, originally stood at close to $900 billion, significantly more than the $819 billion version passed by the House. With Democrats in the Senate lacking enough votes to ensure passage, and watching poll numbers suggesting that Republican attacks on the "spendulus" package filled with funds that wouldn't stimulate the economy were taking hold with the American public, the small group of moderates sought to cut it back.

Among the biggest changes for higher education is the outright elimination of a $3.5 billion "higher education facilities modernization fund" designed to be divided among states to finance renovations of "shovel ready" campus buildings (the House bill contains $6 billion for such a fund). College officials, anticipating the injection of funds, have been dusting off proposals for facilities that have gone wanting because their states couldn't finance them or they couldn't raise outside money for them.

The Senate version would also provide significantly less money to states that have been counting on the stimulus package to help them backfill budget gaps for education programs. The original Senate legislation, like the House version, would have created a $39 billion "stabilization" fund designed to be distributed to states to keep their higher education and K-12 budgets at their 2008 levels, as well as $25 billion in additional money for states to use to sustain crucial public services, including education.

Under the revised Senate version, the stabilization fund would be cut by a third, to $26.7 billion, and the additional $25 billion pool would shrink to $9.6 billion.

This is likely to be a major issue in states such as Missouri, where Gov. Jay Nixon's agreement with university leaders to keep higher education whole in the 2010 budget, in exchange for freezing tuition, depends on the federal stimulus funds to make it work.

Several other pots of research money were also stripped from or reduced in the Senate compromise.

The cuts in education-related programs were admittedly difficult for some of those directly involved in the negotiations. "It's a painful area for all of us, as Democrats, to make these cuts in education assistance," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who is assistant majority leader in the Senate.

Whether they have gone too far in their trimming, especially in areas such as education, may depend in large part on the reaction of House Democrats, who passed their version of the legislation without any Republican support and reacted coolly to the revised Senate plan. The Senate is scheduled to vote on the stimulus bill tomorrow , and lawmakers from the House and Senate (almost certainly with the close involvement of the Obama administration) will then try to hammer out differences between the bills to come up with a version of the measure that can pass both houses and win the president's signature.

A chart comparing the House and Senate versions, as modified, is below. The chart is based on a summary of the Senate compromise released late Friday that specifically notes that it does not contain all programs that would be funded by the bill, and on reports from higher education officials tracking the legislation. So what's below is subject to change as more details become available:

The Stimulus and Higher Education