Pell Grants Quotes

Governor Romney, how many fewer college degrees would it take to make America more competitive?

More and more people in our party understand that we’ve got to have a defense of what government does well, from never missing a check in Social Security to the very reliable Medicare, to the air we breathe and the water we drink, and helping kids to College with Pell Grants. We should not be backing off.

So you can go to college on Pell Grants - maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it's turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century.

While millions of American families, including mine and yours, were working hard paying our fair share, it seems Donald Trump was contributing nothing to our nation. Imagine that. Not fair. Nothing for Pell grants to help kids go to college. Nothing for veterans. Nothing for our military.

We simply can't keep providing money from the federal government in the form of subsidized or actual loans and Pell Grants when we don't have the money.

I am disappointed that Senator Ayotte has voted repeatedly for deep cuts in Pell Grants that would make college more expensive for thousands of New Hampshire students and voted against allowing young people to refinance their student loans.

When Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell first proposed the grants that now bear his name, he envisioned a way to help students attend our country's wonderful colleges and universities, so they could share in the American Dream.

Pell grants are critical tools for lower- and middle-income students to access higher education, and by expanding access to year-round courses, we can help non-traditional students complete their education sooner, allowing them to start their careers and pay off their loans.

Any cut to Pell Grants means low-income must take out additional loans or work longer hours - risk factors that increase their odds of dropping out of school.

Funding and maintaining programs from Head Start to Pell Grants must be a high priority.

The difficulty is, Pell Grants are an attempt to do the right thing, and that is to give the low-income student an opportunity to access higher education, and that's a good thing. And welfare was an attempt to help those most in need. The difficulty is, often times a program is so successful that it grows and grows and grows and grows.

Given the best of all possible worlds, I would make a few changes. I would place emphasis on increasing the amount of funding that goes into programs like Pell Grants, that purely and simply award funds to students who really cannot afford full tuition.

For millions of Americans, federally subsidized student loans and Pell Grants are an important resource for us to get ahead so we can achieve the American dream.

Pell grants are the foundation of Federal student aid. As someone who attended college with the help of Pell grants and as chairman of the Pell Grant Caucus, I know how important they are for our Nation's low-income students.

I've met students across Rhode Island who rely on Pell Grants. They work hard, play by rules, and are doing everything they can to get the education they need for the jobs of tomorrow.

We spent $100 billion on education, saving the education system 300,000 teachers who were laid off because of the recession. We also put tens of thousands of lower income kids in college through Pell grants which has fundamentally all their opportunity. We did the same thing with regard to what we did on transportation. So we weren't just trying to - we knew we had to do something big to keep us from going over the cliff into a depression and pull us out of hole.

The higher amount you put into higher education, at the federal level particularly, the more the price of higher education rises. It's the dog that never catches its tail. You increase student loans, you increase grants, you increase Pell grants, Stafford loans, and what happens? They raise the price.

In my family, there was one cardinal priority - education. College was not an option; it was mandatory. So even though we didn't have a lot of money, we made it work. I signed up for financial aid, Pell Grants, work study, anything I could.

There's a true schizophrenia where if you say to voters, you know, do you think the federal government spends too much money and they should spend less, they say yeah, absolutely. Then you name specific things, like Pell grants for students and they say, no, not that. How 'bout NIH, medical research funding? Nah, you really shouldn't cut that. And pretty soon you've proved that what the American public is against is arithmetic.

Immortality awaits the legislator fortunate enough to have a significant law named after him. Think of Pell grants or Stafford loans for students, Sarbanes-Oxley to regulate Wall Street, or the Hyde Amendment on abortions.

Pell Grants aren't 'welfare,' they are a gateway to opportunity for some of our nation's best and brightest students.

Sometimes I wonder how much of these debates have to do with the desire, the legitimate desire, for that history to be recognized. Because there is a psychic power to the recognition that is not satisfied with a universal program, it's not satisfied by the Affordable Care Act, or an expansion of Pell grants, or an expansion of the earned-income tax credit.

Pell Grants are, and have been, critically important tools in making higher education a possibility for lower- and middle-income students.

The Republicans claim they are for strengthening Pell grants when the truth is that over the last four years, their legislation has done the exact opposite.

Pell Grants open a lot of doors, but they rely on a solvent government.