While the $5,500 maximum Pell Grant survived the budget battle, the increasingly costly program is facing growing hostility.
Pell Grants for low-income college students are “turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century,” said Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Montana, on Blog Talk Radio earlier this month. Students can collect grants for nine years without earning a degree, he complained. “There ought to be some kind of commitment and end game.”
When Rehberg’s comments were reported in Montana, where he’s running for the U.S. Senate, he said he didn’t mean to compare Pell Grant recipients to welfare recipients.
“The difficulty is, Pell Grants are an attempt to do the right thing, and that is to give the low-income student an opportunity to access higher education, and that’s a good thing,” he said in an April 5 interview with Voices of Montana. “And welfare was an attempt to help those most in need. The difficulty is, often times a program is so successful that it grows and grows and grows and grows.”
“I’m not suggesting that college students are welfare recipients,” he added. “I’m just saying that the program itself is expending so quickly it’s moving beyond the federal government’s ability” to pay for it.
Pell is expected to cost $43 billion next year, Rehberg pointed out.
