Executive Calendar

EXECUTIVE CALENDAR

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss my amendment to the fiscal year 2007 budget resolution, which would have provided immediately for a $4,500 Pell grant for needy students. My amendment would have redirected the savings generated by the HELP Committee as part of reconciliation back to student aid, as originally intended and passed by the committee and the full Senate.

Last year, through Chairman Enzi's leadership, the HELP Committee drafted a bipartisan Higher Education Act reauthorization and reconciliation instructions. The committee was instructed to find savings of $13.7 billion--$7 billion of which was to be generated from education programs. The committee developed reconciliation instructions that included savings of over $20 billion. As a member of the HELP Committee, I can say that we purposely generated additional savings with the intent that a portion of the savings would be returned to students in the form of grant aid.

Accordingly, the committee created two programs for Pell-eligible students. We allocated $2.25 billion for SMART grants to target aid to students who study math, science or a critical foreign language. We also allocated $6 billion to the Provisional Grant Assistance Program, or ProGAP. These increases in the Pell grant program are critical, given that tuition has increased rapidly.

This year alone, tuition rose by 7.1 percent at public colleges and 5.9 percent at private universities. Yet students and families have seen no growth in the Pell grant program in the past 4 years; the maximum Pell award has been stagnant at $4,050 since fiscal year 2003. ProGAP would have immediately provided current Pell recipients with a $4,500 maximum grant.

However, when the Deficit Reduction Act returned to the Senate from conference with the House, ProGAP had been eliminated and was replaced by Academic Competitiveness grants. The majority will claim to have increased grant aid for needy students through Academic Competitiveness and SMART grants.

However, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that less than 10 percent of Pell-eligible students will be able to take advantage of the Academic Competitiveness and SMART grants in 2006. The percent of eligible students rises slowly, from 10.3 percent in 2007 to a paltry 13.5 percent in 2010. Given the existence of both Academic Competitiveness and SMART grants in the conference bill, adopting my amendment would have allowed us to help both needy Pell students and target math and science programs.

The intention of the committee was for the savings generated from changes to the student loan programs go towards deficit reduction and student aid. Not only did the final bill significantly reduce the aid going to students, the savings are clearly going for tax cuts that will not help the families we sought to help in the bill we passed in the Senate. In fact, even with the savings generated through the Deficit Reduction Act, the tax cuts cost more than the savings we generated. The newest tax cuts yet again result in an increase to the deficit.

Currently only one-third of the U.S. workforce has a postsecondary education, but it is estimated that 60 percent of new jobs in the 21st century will require a college education. Workers who have attended college on average have higher incomes and lower rates of unemployment than those who don't. And those with a college education also are more likely to have jobs with benefits like health care, retirement and pensions plans.

My amendment would have restored our original intent of the Senate by redirecting the savings generated by the HELP Committee into the pockets of needy students, not the pockets of the wealthy benefiting from the tax cuts.

Mr. President, I withdrew my amendment after we had a huge victory for education--the overwhelming passage of the Specter-Harkin amendment which would provide $7 billion in increased funding to health and education programs. As an appropriator, I know first hand how critical that funding will be for education programs in fiscal year 2007. But we must all fight to retain that funding when the budget resolution is conferenced with the House. We should not accept a final budget resolution that does not contain the funding provided through the Specter-Harkin amendment.

While I withdrew my amendment today, I will continue to fight for increasing Pell grants and student aid. We can do better than level funding for our nation's needy college students.

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