Cutting in the Wrong Places

Like a schoolyard bully short on cash, the Bush administration has decided to steal lunch money from the smart kids’ piggy banks.

In the face of the burgeoning U.S. budget deficit and Republicans’ penchant for tax cuts, something had to give—and higher education did. Under the budget legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Feb. 1, student loan programs face a net cut of approximately $12 billion, which will lead to a rise in interest rates to 6.8 percent for student loans and 8.5 percent for parent loans by this July pending Senate approval and President Bush’s signature. These cuts would account for close to a third of the overall $39 billion proposed reduction in federal spending.

This legislation deals a further blow to a nation that is struggling to live up to its reputation as the land of opportunity. At the nation’s top 146 colleges, only 3 percent of freshmen come from the poorest quarter of the population. At Harvard, the median family income of students is $150,000 and that’s with the benefit of a Harvard Financial Aid Inititiative, which eliminates the parental contribution to college costs for families earning under $40,000 a year. Whatever metrics are used, the story is the same: the odds are stacked against those students who come from poor backgrounds.

Federal funding for student loans has long served as a life raft for students and families worried about debt from what can be prohibitively high tuition costs. Many students enter college knowing they will graduate with thousands of dollars in debt (the median debt for a Harvard student in the Class of 2005 was $6,400). The increase in interest rates on student loans will serve as a disincentive for many promising students to attend college, and make it more difficult for poor students to complete their degree.

One cannot ignore the hypocrisy evident in policies of the Republican-led Congress. The budget legislation that cuts educational funding came only one day after Bush called for the U.S. to bolster its competitiveness in education during his State of the Union address. Republican Representative Adam H. Putnam of Florida defended the Deficit Reduction Act by citing that it curbs “the unsustainable growth rate of mandatory programs that are set to consume 62 percent of our total federal budget in the next decade if left unchecked.” It seems as though Congress has opted to make the U.S. more competitive by taking money from poor students to fund tax cuts for the parents of rich ones.

Thankfully, there is one educational initiative that we can applaud. Coinciding with his goals outlined in the State of the Union, Bush proposed new federal grants of up to $4,000 dollars for students studying math, science, and certain foreign languages. Republicans and Democrats alike have called for new legislation to stunt what they see as a trend of a decreasingly competitive U.S.—particularly in the fields of technology and engineering. We hope that the proposed initiative will serve as an incentive for students to study fields in which the U.S. is lagging.

In the end, however, the numbers don’t add up. Proposing roughly $6 billion towards making the U.S. more competitive in math and science, while cutting $12 billion from higher education loans are fuzzy numbers for the self-anointed “education president.”