Candidates for the presidential nomination have been touring the country for months touting their plans for how they are going to change the country if they win the election in November.
During recent stops in Wisconsin that included UW-Eau Claire, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have focused their campaigns on their plans for higher education and college affordability, among other issues.
In the meantime, Congress has already started working on reforming some of those issues, particularly higher education and college affordability.
The House of Representatives passed legislation on the issue Feb. 7. The College Opportunity and Affordability Act amends and reauthorizes the Higher Education Act of 1965 passed and signed by then-President Lyndon Johnson.
“It’s a nice package of reforms,” said U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-La Crosse.) Kind was one of 354 representatives in the House who voted to pass the measure along to the Senate.
Congress introduced the bill into the House in early November 2007. If passed and signed by President Bush, the bill would extend the Higher Education Act until 2013, implement programs to reform and increase financial aid, as well as cap tuition hikes and improve education opportunities for low-income and veteran students.
Kind said Congress had just finished with an overall higher education bill just before the winter recess, which tackled questions of rising textbook costs and financial aid issues. This current bill is a supplement to the one passed in the fall, he said.
One of the main topics in the recent bill that was “paramount” to Kind was the reforms on financial aid, he said.
If the bill makes it through the Senate and the president signs it, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form would see drastic changes by becoming a one-page document, rather than the multi-page form it currently is. Reforming the application process for financial aid was a topic both Democratic presidential candidates pressed on during their stops in Eau Claire. Both Chelsea Clinton, speaking on behalf of her mother, and Obama said they plan to change the FAFSA form into checking a box on tax forms.
The bill would also increase the maximum Pell Grant award to $9,000 for each student. Kind said Congress made this possible by freeing up money that would have otherwise gone to pay private lenders to offer financial aid.
As far as lending is concerned, the bill puts a ban on financial relationships between private lending companies and universities, such as those lenders who share revenues with universities and vice-versa. It also makes sure universities and lenders give adequate information on their financial aid services that is easy for parents, students and the public to use and understand.
“The financial aid programs (in the bill) were paramount,” Kind said. “Trying to make tuition more affordable for any student at any school of higher education is essential in opening up those doors for opportunity,” adding that students are regularly facing $19,000 or $20,000 of debt when they graduate college and having to face an increasing national debt is a “double whammy” to students.
Also addressed in the bill were requirements for tuition increases. According to the bill, the Department of Education would award public universities grants if they keep tuition increases less than the rate of inflation. The institutions would then disburse the grants as “need-based grant aid” to students in the form of federal Pell Grants.
In addition to the federal bill, Kind, who has six universities and four technical colleges in his district, said state legislatures have to do their part in ensuring stronger higher education, adding that the state should allocate at least five years of funding for the UW System.
“My concern in Wisconsin is that the state legislature is cutting funding and then coming to Washington and saying we need to do more to help them, then they go back and raise tuition,” he said. “There’s shared responsibility. The federal government has the higher education bill and the state needs to provide five years of funding.”