All eyes have been on the end of affirmative action, but an emerging bipartisan bill would bar wealthy colleges from accepting federal student loans, with major consequences.
The Supreme Court’s June decision to curtail the use of race in admissions shook American higher education. Absent affirmative action, Black and Latino enrollments drop, and highly selective campuses become less diverse. But a new threat to diversity at these colleges emerged this week—one that could deal just as damaging a blow to their socioeconomic and racial compositions.
On Tuesday, members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce met to discuss a bill that would expand short-term Pell Grants. But deep inside that bill was language that would have a far more dramatic effect on higher education: It would ban students who attend Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or any of the roughly 50 other wealthy, private colleges subject to a tax on their endowment from taking out federal student loans.
America’s reliance on student loans is imperfect, but this move would hurt students far more than the colleges they attend. According to the National Association for Independent Colleges and Universities, approximately 64,000 students stand to lose $1.8 billion in student loansaid if the bill passes in its current form. Duke University, for example, estimated that 3,400 of its students, including 700 nursing students, would lose access to loans.
Ronald Brownstein: Curtailing affirmative action is a blow against a rising generation
On Tuesday, however, committee members argued that the ban is necessary. As with any bill before Congress, lawmakers considering the short-term Pell expansion were asked to find a “pay-for”—that is, to find money elsewhere in the budget to cover the cost of the new grants. In a bipartisan effort, both Republican and Democratic members of the committee looked to the wealthiest colleges in the nation as the ideal place to find the extra cash. If the ban, which passed out of committee with 37 representatives voting yes and eight—six Democrats and two Republicans—voting no and which will be considered by the full House, becomes law, the money that would otherwise be necessary to originate and service students loans at wealthy, highly selective institutions would be used to cover the short-term grants. The ban would take effect on July 1, 2024.
The assumption by lawmakers on the committee is that the colleges subject to the ban would just foot the bill for all of their students. As Lucy McBath, a Georgia Democrat, put it, “the intent of the offset is to require institutions with large endowments to meet the financial obligations of all students.” In many cases, institutions like Harvard and Yale already cover the cost of tuition and fees for low-income undergrads, but many middle-class students would be forced to take out private loans, which can have astronomical interest rates. Graduate students, many of whom rely heavily on loans to subsidize their education, would be forced to look to private loans as well. If they were unable to secure private loans, they could not attend.
“I find it astounding that the very Democrats who railed against the Supreme Court on affirmative action voted yes on this bill,” Amy Laitinen, the senior director for higher-education policy at New America, a left-leaning think tank, told me. “How can we say we are concerned about diversity at the elite institutions in this country and take away the ability for anybody who is not exceedingly wealthy to pay to attend?” In plain terms, the result would be that these colleges, law schools, medical schools, and other graduate programs would look for more students who could cover the full cost of their attendance—meaning the institutions would likely become even more racially and socioeconomically homogenous.
“We can wish for a loan-free system all we want, but the truth is until we actually start to pay for everything with grants, we’re going to push people into predatory private student loans,” Laitinen said. The Senate has a similar short-term Pell bill to consider; it does not have the pay-for included, but advocates worry that if such a provision so easily slipped into the House legislation, it could be slotted into the Senate’s version as well.
Adam Harris: The decision that upends the Equal-Protection clause
The institutions that would be subject to the ban—several of which are still dealing with the fallout from a disastrous performance on Capitol Hill during a hearing about anti-Semitism on campus—have been quiet on the issue. The argument that the colleges do not have the resources to fully fund all their students was always going to be tough to make—even if they might have a reasonable case about the sustainability of doing so for a long time. But now isn’t a good time for these institutions to need friends on Capitol Hill.
Some of the committee members may hope that the pay-for is removed during further deliberations, but there’s no guarantee that it will be. “When we’re close to getting something bipartisan, people often bend over backwards,” Laitinen said. “But I don’t think bending over backwards at the expense of Black and brown students is the way to do it.”
A New Threat to Diversity at Elite Colleges
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15.12.2023
All eyes have been on the end of affirmative action, but an emerging bipartisan bill would bar wealthy colleges from accepting federal student loans, with major consequences.
The Supreme Court’s June decision to curtail the use of race in admissions shook American higher education. Absent affirmative action, Black and Latino enrollments drop, and highly selective campuses become less diverse. But a new threat to diversity at these colleges emerged this week—one that could deal just as damaging a blow to their socioeconomic and racial compositions.
On Tuesday, members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce met to discuss a bill that would expand short-term Pell Grants. But deep inside that bill was language that would have a far more dramatic effect on higher education: It would ban students who attend Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or any of the roughly 50 other wealthy, private colleges subject to a tax on their endowment from taking out federal student loans.
America’s reliance on student loans is imperfect, but this move would hurt students far more than the colleges they attend. According to the National Association for Independent Colleges and Universities, approximately 64,000 students stand to lose $1.8 billion in student loansaid if the bill passes in its current form. Duke........
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