Romney disagrees with financial aid

To Mitt Romney, the answer to cutting costs in higher education has always been competition. He has previously stated that colleges and students should receive as little government aid as possible, and that the results of cutting aid would be lower tuition costs.

His assertion that prospective college students in the United States should get “as much education as they can afford” is one that is touted in conservative ideology as sincerely austere and fiscally responsible.

His proposed cuts in aid target Pell Grants and unsubsidized federal loans, as Garett has written, but Romney is also running on the platform that more resources should be diverted from “failing” public schools, whether elementary or undergraduate, into religious and charter schools.

On Romney’s campaign website it is written that his two main concerns when it comes to higher education are that it is available and affordable, because “Mitt believes education is a key to the American dream, and students must be encouraged to pursue that dream and work hard to achieve it.”

To combat his opponent’s accusations, that he is out of touch with the financial woes of average Americans, his education platform also reads, “Post-secondary education cannot become a luxury for the few; instead, all students should have the opportunity to attend a college that best suits their needs.”

Although he said he believes in encouragement and all students being able to go to school, it would seem that he does not believe in the type of encouragement that helps students pay their tuition and other expenses. He has yet to advance a plan on higher education, but he has made sure to outline his plan to gut the funding for Pell Grants and Stafford loans, and believes all students (that require more money than they have to go to school) should take their loans out from private banks at higher interest rates.

To lack any kind of specifics for a plan for higher education other than what you will eliminate seemed odd to me at first, until I read some of his other plans.

“The unifying thread of his national security strategy is American strength. When America is strong, the world is safer. It is only American power—conceived in the broadest terms—that can provide the foundation for an international system that ensures the security and prosperity of the United States and our friends and allies.”

This is the first segment of his plan for an American Century in foreign policy. The phrase “in the broadest terms” seems to be an underlying theme of the Romney campaign, but if and when he proposes a plan to establish an American Century in domestic education and college attendance, I will write a column outlining its components and publish it in the paper you are now reading.

For now, I must side with the only plan being put forward. That is the one that doesn’t cut the financial aid to 65% of the undergraduates in this country according to a U.S. Department of Education report from 2008.

It is one thing to say every student should be able to go to college, and another to give assistance that actually works.