The amendment for Student Loaning

Student aid initiative, as part of the final amendments to the heath care bill, will be eliminating "a $60 billion program that supports private student loans with federal subsidies and replacing it with government lending to students". Out of the total $61 billion in savings over 10 years, $36 billion will go to Pell grants, and smaller portions will go "towards reducing the deficit and to various Democratic priorities, including community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and caps on loan payments".

The Pell grant in the past

once covered more than two-thirds of total costs at a public university... [but] now covers about one-third... the maximum grant could be scaled back by more than half to $2,150 and at least 500,000 students could be dropped from the program... So if this legislation did not pass, you would see catastrophic cuts to the Pell grant program, effectively slamming the door shut for hundreds of thousands of students, if not millions, who rely on the Pell grant program to go to school

said Rich Williams, higher education associate for U.S. PIRG, the federation fo state Public Interest Research Groups.

One of Kentucky's state representatives, Brett Guthrie, stated in opposition that "Instead of making student loans more affordable or preserving choice, competition and innovation in the loan program, Democrats are taking money from struggling students' pockets to help pay for a government takeover of health care". Although there is truth in his statement, I do not think that this is over. I hope the government will come up with a way for the students to gain money, and the government to use money for correct purposes..

To summarize the his position of the student loan amendment, Daniel de Vise wrote

The amount directed at Pell grants would drop from $40 billion to $36 billion, and a portion of the smaller amount would go toward closing an unexpected shortfall in the grant program, oversubscribed because of the recession. The annual Pell grant would rise to $5,975 by 2017 from the current $5,550, and for the first time, it would be linked to the consumer price index. In the original House bill, the Pell target was $6,900.

Community colleges would get $2 billion, down from $10 billion in the original bill. More than $20 billion in initiatives for early education, K-12 school modernization and student loan interest-rate reduction would be eliminated. But a $2.6 billion investment in historically black colleges would survive. The new bill also includes a $1.5 billion initiative that would cap a borrower's monthly loan payments at 10 percent of income, down from 15 percent.

What I did not like about this article was that it was biased. If someone reads this article, they only learn of the negatives of the student loan amendment in the Health Care Bill. To make the article better, I think that there should have been some positives of the amendment.

This is personal to me because I was thinking of applying for the Pell grant program for college. this this information, it shows me that I have a lower chance of getting the grant. Without the money, I may not be able to go to the college of my choice to get the degree that I want.