At Senate Hearing, College Presidents Warn Against Pell Cuts

When Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, kicked off his broadly titled hearing Wednesday on “The State of Higher Education,” he mixed a critique of how much higher education costs students with a denunciation—now familiar from conservatives—of diversity, equity and inclusion.

“This increased cost often is not going to improve education,” said Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican. “Often, those dollars are being funneled to promote a DEI ideology, dividing students based on race and ethnicity.”

“Instead of promoting academic excellence, many campuses have been ideologically captured, becoming hotbeds of hate and division,” Cassidy continued. “Students leave college woefully unprepared for the workforce while being saddled with insurmountable debt that they cannot pay back. Comprehensive reform of higher education is needed.”

But, as the two-hour hearing on Capitol Hill went on, there was little further discussion of DEI or antisemitism (the latter was the focus of a hearing Cassidy held in March).

Instead, witnesses’ testimony and senators’ statements and questions focused on how to address the cost of college. The Democrats on the committee used the forum to denounce proposed cuts to the Pell program that House Republicans have included in their reconciliation package—which may soon come before the Senate—and to criticize the Trump administration for gutting the Education Department. 

And the witnesses, who included the presidents of a historically Black university and a Christian university and the chancellor of a large community college district, broadly agreed that at least some of the House’s proposed reconciliation cuts would reduce access to higher education. 

“I believe that all of you mentioned Pell Grants,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent and ranking member of the committee, said after the witnesses’ opening statements. “And I think the elephant in the room is—as many of you know—right now there is a Republican-led, so-called reconciliation bill, which would provide massive tax breaks to the very rich and cut programs that working families need.”

Citing figures from the left-leaning think tank the Center for American Progress, Sanders said the legislation would eliminate Pell Grants for “1.4 million working-class students and substantially reduce Pell Grants for three million low-income students.” He asked the witnesses who lead colleges what this would mean.

“The vast majority of our students use Pell Grants,” replied Mark A. Brown, the Tuskegee University president whom Republicans invited to testify. “If you reduce Pell Grants, you will probably increase the amount used in student loans. If you cap access to student loans and at the same time reduce Pell Grants, you will hurt access to education for those who begin their educational journey in poverty or with significant need.”

Sanders replied, “Dr. Brown, if you could convey that message to Republican members of Congress, I would appreciate it.” Sanders then asked a Democratic witness—Russell Lowery-Hart, chancellor of the Austin Community College District—what the Pell cuts would do to students at his institution.

Lowery-Hart said over 75 percent of his students attend part-time and expressed concern that the reconciliation package will strip Pell funding from thousands of them. Michael Lindsay—a Republican invitee who is president of Taylor University, a Christian institution in Indiana—told Sanders, “I think all of us recognize the key difference that Pell has made.”

It didn’t take Democratic questioning to draw out defenses of federal funding for education access. In his opening statement, Lowery-Hart said that “potential changes to Pell, especially part-time Pell, could be devastating” to his typical students and future generations.

Brown, of Tuskegee, said, “Reductions in federal needs-based funding would negatively impact nine out of 10 HBCU students.” He also specifically defended the Grad PLUS program, which allows students to borrow up to the cost of attending graduate school. The reconciliation plan would end the Grad PLUS program and cap how much graduate students can borrow.

“Eliminating or reducing Graduate PLUS loans without an alternative would severely limit access to graduate education, particularly for high-need, high-potential students in critical fields,” Brown said.

He also said senators should oppose “risk-sharing” models. The reconciliation proposal would require colleges to pay a penalty based on the amount of students’ unpaid loans. Brown noted that many institutions serve students who might be less likely to be able to repay.

“The risk is not equal among colleges,” Brown said later in the hearing.

Worries Over Parent PLUS

The Parent PLUS program, which the reconciliation package would severely restrict, received particular attention Wednesday. The program lets guardians take out loans to finance their dependents’ education. These loans aren’t capped and have higher interest rates than the standard direct loan.

“Dr. Brown, you’ve written about the challenges facing the Parent PLUS program and pointed out that HBCU students and parents rely on Parent PLUS—but sometimes it saddles the family with debt they cannot pay,” Cassidy said. “And so that which is extended in compassion becomes a shackle keeping them from growth.”

Brown responded that “loans in general create a financial burden on students that is not sustainable.” He said, “If a family has an estimated family contribution of zero, and then you extend a Parent PLUS loan to that family, what’s the likelihood that that family will, with any reason, be able to pay it?”

But Brown again said access to higher education might be cut off if those loans are removed “without an alternative.”

“This was supposed to be solved within the Pell Grant part of the [federal financial aid] program and not within the loan part,” Brown said. “The loans create a debt trap; it takes away the social and economic mobility that is intended of education. So I wish we did not need the loans at all—but until we do something to reform the level of Pell Grant, it ends up being the difference in access.”

Cassidy replied that he’s heard of parents who end up “drowning in debt from this.” He then turned to Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and a Republican witness, who suggested getting rid of Parent PLUS and increasing Pell Grants to make up the gap.

“Another option is just rely more on the private sector to do that lending,” Gillen said, saying private lenders wouldn’t lend to parents who couldn’t repay the loans.

Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center and a Democratic witness, put it simply: “We deserve to live in a country where public college is free and there is no student debt.”

The hearing—which senators attended sparsely, with some leaving right after asking their questions of witnesses—didn’t shed much light on how much Republican senators, who hold a slim majority in their chamber, support their House colleagues’ proposals.

‘Crisis of Antisemitism’

The hearing wasn’t completely without culture-related critiques of higher education. Sen. Ashley Moody, a Florida Republican, said, “Students are graduating with higher amounts of debt, with degrees that are sometimes not even useful—in some cases they even have a disdain for the very principles and ideals needed to continue this great experiment in self-government.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said there’s a “crisis of antisemitism that’s currently afflicting many universities, and frankly many parts of this country.” He said a rabbi friend told him that “so few students in particular are taught any kind of biblical history. They’re certainly not taught the history of Israel, [and] they don’t understand the spiritual foundations that link the people of Israel historically with the United States of America, our shared moral principles.”

Getting to his question, Hawley asked Lindsay, from Taylor University, “Do you think that Christian colleges and universities have a special role to play now in rooting out this terror of antisemitism, this scourge of antisemitism, by recalling us to those things that we believe together, to our common moral principles?”

Lindsay said his university has a partnership with Jerusalem University College, where honors students have studied abroad. He said that changed “their understanding of the experience of Jewish people around the world.”

But in his ending remarks, Cassidy noted the seeming lack of political posturing Wednesday.

“Republicans asked questions of Democratic witnesses and Democrats asked questions of Republican witnesses,” Cassidy said, “and that shows that there was a broad interest in what everybody had to say as opposed to just merely kind of repeating partisan talking points.”