WALDORF, Md. —The Obama administration pressed onward Monday with its proposed college affordability plan – dispatching several high-level education officials to three different states to tout the plan’s relevance to everyday students trying to make their way toward a degree.
Among the places that Team Obama visited Monday was the Waldorf Higher Education Center, where roughly two dozen students from a variety of Maryland colleges and universities crammed into a third-floor conference room to hear from and speak with a Democratic congressman, a state lawmaker and an assistant secretary of education.
Ostensibly a listening session meant to give the students a voice on the issue of the cost of college education, the event also gave Democrats a platform to remind constituents during an election year what Team Obama has done to make higher education more affordable and more accessible — the boosting of Pell grants and simplification of the FASFA forms, for instance — since President Obama took office in 2009.
U.S. Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) repeatedly cast the issue of college affordability as a key element of American competitiveness in a global economy, tying students’ individual well-being to the future well-being of the nation.
“What it’s for is to make sure that our society succeeds and is competitive and is growing and expanding,” Hoyer said of college education and the federal money reserved to support students and institutions. “It is for you to take advantage of,” Hoyer said, “because if you succeed individually, collectively we’ll succeed.”
Based on what the students told Hoyer, Maryland State Delegate John L. Bohanan, Jr., and Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education Eduardo M. Ochoa, a series of hurdles stand between the students and the degrees that they’re being told they need to succeed in today’s economy.
Those hurdles ranged from lack of awareness and information about the true cost of college to ineligibility for various grants because their parents earn too much — but not enough, they say, to pay for college.
