Spellings on Obama's Pell Grant Policy

Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings speaks out on the recent student aid bill that provides Pell Grant increases, in a Chronicle of Higher Education article:

Ms. Spellings said, such increases should be accompanied by assurances that the money is going to college-ready high-school graduates.

"This idea that that's the way we do it now—that we take kids who are not capable of doing college work and give them money so they can do it—who's for that? Nobody. That's stupid," the former secretary said.

Ms. Spellings said she was particularly dismayed by the Obama administration's abandonment of a pair of grant programs for low-income students—Academic Competitiveness Grants and Smart Grants—that the Bush administration created with Democratic support.

The programs were "administratively burdensome, granted," Ms. Spellings said. Their failure, however, "frankly was a testament to how broken the interface is between high schools and colleges," she said. And now the Obama administration appears to be saying: "Let's get rid of the solution because we can't fix the problem," she said.

Argument Against Making the Pell an Entitlement

My colleagues Andrew Gillen and Richard Vedder at CCAP have an excellent piece up on the CCAP blog, arguing against making the Pell Grant an entitlement:

the Pell grant is the preferred approach for the government to provide federal aid, and expanding this program is defensible even in times of fiscal stringency. But making it an entitlement and setting it to increase at the rate of inflation (or more) is a huge mistake.