Investing in the future

President Barack Obama has lofty goals. He not only wants to dig the country out of the economic crisis, convert to clean energy, pull out of Iraq and fix the health care system – he also wants the United States to “have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”

Obama has an impressive history of working to make college affordable.
As a senator in 2007, he co-sponsored a bill to increase the maximum Pell Grant by 25 percent. Frustrated with the problem both in his home state of Illinois and at the national level, it was one of his first pieces of legislation.

As president, he seems to continue to place a priority on access to higher education. Maybe it’s because college-aged adults constituted a large part of his supporters during his presidential campaign, maybe it’s because he benefitted from financial aid himself – whatever the reason, we’ll take it. More financial aid for college is always welcome.

His plans for the Pell Grant ensure growth in tandem with inflation, with maximum grants increasing by 150 percent in the next decade.

 In a bold move, he’d also like to decrease government-guaranteed loans in favor of more government direct loans.

This would reverse the current situation, wherein government-subsidized lenders gave $56 billion in loans while the government directly lent only $14 billion.

This constitutes a pretty big step in the government’s involvement with financial aid, and we think that’s a good thing. In Obama’s address to Congress last week, he emphasized that fewer college graduates is a recipe for economic decline.

He even asked that every American commit to at least one year of post-secondary education.

Because the majority of expanding career fields require more than a high school diploma, more of those types of jobs will have to be shipped overseas if employment can’t be met in this country.

Clearly, education is an investment on a personal and national level, and it’s nice to have a president who seems to understand that.

 If it’s in the country’s best interest for more students to graduate from college, then the government needs to bear at least some of the responsibility for making it affordable.