While the federal budget proposal released by the White House stresses national security and public safety, higher education leaders blasted the spending blueprint Thursday as one that will make college less accessible, less affordable and set back the nation’s workforce and research interests.
Among other things, stakeholders took the White House to task for seeking to “raid” surplus Pell grant funding for $3.9 billion, seeking to scrap a separate program that enables colleges and universities to target assistance toward their neediest students, and cutting back on federal college access programs — such as GEAR UP and TRIO — that they say provide crucial help to low-income students.
“If this proposal were enacted, all students, particularly students of color and low-income students, throughout the entire continuum of our education system would suffer, as would the nation’s businesses who desperately need a skilled workforce to be successful,” said John B. King, Jr., CEO and president of The Education Trust, and former U.S. Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama.
“College and community leaders should be outraged by these proposed cuts that will harm the very people President Trump promised to protect,” said Dr. Michelle Asha Cooper, president at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
“Instead of raiding existing Pell Grant program funds, the Trump Administration should call upon Congress to enact smart and impactful investments including year-round Pell, indexing the Pell Grant to inflation, increasing the maximum award, and supporting the SEOG program,” Cooper said, using the acronym for the Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant program, which the budget targets for elimination.
There were no shortage of critics who made similar observations of President Donald Trump’s proposed budget — formally titled in the style of his campaign rhetoric as “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again” — who assailed the budget’s proposed increase to defense and security spending by $54 billion while at the same time proposing a $9.2 billion cut to spending at the US Department of Education — a 13 percent decrease.
“A budget that puts America first must make the safety of our people its number one priority— because without safety, there can be no prosperity,” President Trump said in the budget proposal. It also says it “protects support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions” by “maintaining $492 million in funding for programs that serve high percentages of minority students.”
