Quick Bush budget question

[GRLMGC]

In addition to freezing the amount of pell grant money college students get, does he aim to eliminate Perkins loans?

[MadMaddie]

1. I think they are impacted also...

Bush and Budget in the same sentence......

[GRLMGC]

3. I've read about K-12 education

and its total bullshit. There isn't that much on higher education though, which is most likely fucked as well.

[NYC Liberal]

2. This article might be of help:

http://www.forbes.com/services/2006/02/14/college-loan-programs-cz_ae_0215beltway.html

But the small Perkins Loan Program, which helps lower-income and lower middle-income students, was spared. Now, it turns out, the reprieve may have been temporary. President Bush's fiscal 2007 budget proposal calls for ending the Perkins Loan program altogether.

"There's a lot of angst with the president proposing to eliminate the program," says Harrison Wadsworth, executive director of the Coalition of Higher Education Assistance Organizations, an association of administrators of the Perkins Loan Program.

If Bush wants to wipe out Perkins loans, he's got a convenient opportunity with the reauthorization of the higher education law, which expires March 31. (Actually, the higher ed law expired in 2004, but Congress has temporarily extended it three times since.)

Perkins Loans work off a revolving fund. Money coming in from loan repayments is leant out to new students. The Bush Administration has already ended any new federal contribution to the fund. (The feds had been adding about $100 million per year until fiscal year 2005.) If, as the administration proposes, the Perkins program isn't reauthorized in March, money coming in from repayments will go straight to the Treasury, not to new borrowers, allowing the feds to reclaim $6 billion over six years. "It would be a windfall for the government," complains Wadsworth.

[GRLMGC]

4. Thank you very much

this is very helpful.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

5. some info here...

And a double handful of programs would fare far worse, facing outright elimination. These include both of higher education’s Perkins programs — the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act and the Perkins Loan Program for low-income students – and several efforts designed to increase access to college, including two of the TRIO programs for needy students and the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Program, or Gear Up.

snip>

White House officials also noted that the purposes of some of the education programs slated for elimination under the administration’s budget — especially the Perkins job training programs and the Gear Up and TRIO programs designed to help middle- and high-school students prepare to attend college — would be fulfilled by the Education Department’s proposal $1.5 billion to extend No Child Left Behind to high schools.

snip>

As it did last year, the administration has proposed not only wiping out the $65 million the government provided in 2006 to reimburse colleges for canceled loans, but also forcing colleges to return to the U.S. treasury $664 million in “revolving” funds that the institutions use to continue to make new loans. Those actions, together, would effectively end the Perkins program, which the administration says is “ineffective and duplicative” of the two main federal student loan programs.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/07/edbudget

[misternormal]

6. All this is...

... is another scheme to keep the poor from becoming educated.