GOP unveils college funding overhaul
Would cap some costs but raise bills for many
By: Zachary Schermele
USA Today
WASHINGTON - Republicans in Congress are moving forward with a massive plan to overhaul how Americans pay for college. And they're hoping to make an end-run around Senate Democrats to do it.
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On April 28, [2025] a GOP-led committee in the House of representatives unveiled a sprawling, 100-page budget bill that would reshape much of the college financial aid system. if enacted, the legislation would touch the lives of millions of students and the colleges they attend.
..... It would reduce undergraduate students; eligibility for traditional Pell Grants and penalize some universities for saddling student with crushing debt. Costs for certain college programs would be capped. At the same time, regulations on for-profit colleges would loosen.
..... It would also give student loan borrowers less flexibility in their monthly bills - which for many would go up.
..... The bill would save hundreds of billions of dollars and pave the way for broader tax cuts, said Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican who chairs the Education and Workforce Committee in the House.
..... "Bottom line, its time to fix this broken cycle that is costly to taxpayers and leaves students worse off than if they never went to college,' he said in a statement April 28. [2025]
..... Critics argue the legislation would make it harder for students - especially those form low-income backgrounds - to get to college, graduate and pay back their debts.
..... "Instead of bring down the cost of college, House Republicans want to punish millions of borrowers desperately trying to repay their debts, pushing them further into the rd while allowing some of the most predatory actors in higher ed to profiteer at their expense," Aissa Canchola Banez, the policy director at the Student Borrower Protection Center, a progressive borrower advicey group, said in an April 28 [2025] statement.
..... The bill, which Republicans have dubbed the Student Success and Taxpayer Saving Plan, would stave off a looming shortfall in funding for Pell Grants, federal scholarships that help lower-income students pay for college. Nearly 7 million students rely on them each year.
..... The legislation would also alter Pell eligibility in a few key ways, namely by raising the number of hours students need to study each term to qualify.
..... Those changes would"absolutely wallop community colleges in particular," said Bryce McKibben, the senior director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for Student Basic Needs. Community college students often have more responsibilities, such as jobs and kids, that traditional undergraduates. That dynamic can prevent them from enrolling in more classes.
..... "The bill is a real threat to college affordability and student basic needs," he said.
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Meanwhile, student enrolled in some week-long programs, including training schools for cosmetologists and welders, would qualify for "workforce Pell Grants" for the first time.
..... The legislation proposes a massive restructuring of the federal student loan system. under the proposal the number of repayment plans would shrink form roughly a dozen to just two.
..... One of those programs would replace former President Joe Biden's signature student loan repayment plan, which he called Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE. though Biden's Education Department called it the "most affordable repayment plan ever," conservatives said the program unfairly brought many borrowers' monthly bills to $0, effectively forgiving their debt. SAVE has been tied up in courts for months, leaving millions of borrowers in forbearance until at least September. [2025]
..... Under the GOP's repayment proposal, which Republicans are calling the Paramagnet Assistant Plan, monthly bills would be higher than with Biden's plan. But the program would fix a longstanding problem by making sure borrowers' balances never go up if they make their monthly payments, according to Preston Cooper, a higher education expert and senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise institute.
..... "That's really contributed to a lot of the anger about student loans," he said. "the new repayment plan really is earthshaking."
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If the bill becomes law, some types of loan applications would disappear. on the chopping block would be new direct subsidized loans for undergrads, which don't earn interest while students are in school, as well as some loans for parents and graduate students.
..... Another component of the bill would fine some colleges for saddling students with debt they can't pay back. The idea has been floating around the halls of Congress for years but has met substantial opposition from universities.
..... "It's not meant to ruin these colleges financially," Cooper said. "But it is something that they're going to notice."
..... Despite Republicans' dominance of Washington politics, there are quite a few barriers to the bill becoming law.
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In order to bypass the Democrats and the 60-vote threshold in the U.S. Senate, the GOP is trying to pass the legislation through a special precess called reconciliation. That strategy only works if the bill is mostly a budgetary measure. If it's too ambitious, the "parliamentarian," a nonpartisan rule-keeper in congress, can kill it.
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Some opponents think that's a likely scenario, Sameer Gadkaree, the president of the Institute for College Access & Success, a left-leaning college affordability group, said April 29 [2025] the bill is "far outside of the scope of the budget reconciliation process."
..... It's also not clear to onlookers like Jill Desjean, the director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, whether the downsized U.S. Department of Education even has the staff to implement the changes laid out in the legislation. though layoffs and buyouts, the Trump administration has cut the agency's workforce in half. Those departures have already hampered federal programs, causing issues for students and colleges.
..... "We definitely haven't seen the full fallout of how much work just can't be done anymore,: Desjean said.
..... A federal judge could rule the week of April 27 [2025] on a preliminary injunction to potentially reinstate hundreds of Education Department workers.