Judd Gregg: “The point being, if people pursue courses which we think are important in this country, we basically double the amount…”

“The point being, if people pursue courses which we think are important in this country, we basically double the amount of the Pell grant they will get, which is a fairly significant commitment to those individuals. We have increased the Pell Grant Programs generally also. But it started to make sense to focus dramatic increases in Pell grants on people and on disciplines that we think are important to our culture. The second point is that we have heard in the press and we have heard from the other side this idea that we cut education funding by $12 billion in the reconciliation bill 2 years ago. That is a total misstatement. That is an outright--well, it is so incredible, it rises to the ``L'' word. It truly is dishonest to make that statement. What we did was we reduced lenders' benefits under the student loan program by almost $20 billion, and then we took a big chunk of that money and put it back into student aid. So we actually increased student aid by approximately $9 billion in that reconciliation proposal. It was a significant shift of funds from lenders to kids who are going to school.”