MILLIONS ALREADY "LOCKED OUT" OF HIGHER EDUCATION
by Jon Marc Taylor, MA Bio/AddressThe Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance strongly recommends changes in Pell Grant funding restrictions. Without these drastic modifications, the committee "warns that millions of low-income students will be locked out of a college education unless need-based federal financial aid programs are revitalized immediately" ("Study urges doubling Pell Grants to help low-income students," A Better Life, February 21, 2001).
Sadly, such is already the case. With two million souls locked up, they are now locked out of higher education as well. These men and women are excluded not by lack of access (the colleges & universities will go to them), but are barred instead by the myopic 1994/95 Crime Control Act excluding them from Pell Grant eligibility.
Today there are more young minority men (18-29) in prison than are on college campuses. There are also more poor white men under correctional supervision in American than are sitting in university classrooms. Ninety-percent of the incarcerate (white, black and brown) fell below the poverty threshold prior to their incarceration. Before 1994 these inmate-students met by all measures the Pell Grant criteria and ALL of us were richly rewarded with our social return on our public-funded investment-- recidivism rates were routinely cut by more than two-thirds compared to similar non-educated offenders. Then Congress "got tough" on fighting crime by assuring repeated re-criminalization, re-victimization, and re-incarceration.
Richard Nixon declared, "no qualified student who wants to go to college should be barred by lack of money" ("Collage aid comes up short," Our View, February 21, 2001). Our new "education president" should then be able to include ALL potential students in his reform legislation. If Nixon could go to China, then it would be fitting for Bush to give Pell Grants back to prisoners.
Jon Marc Taylor, AA, BS, MA, Ball State University-Indiana State Reformatory extension program.
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