Jon S. Corzine: “I join with Senators Kennedy and Smith and twenty-seven of our colleagues today in introducing a very important piece of…”

“I join with Senators Kennedy and Smith and twenty-seven of our colleagues today in introducing a very important piece of legislation, the Ensuring College Access for All Americans Act. This bill would prevent any student from seeing a reduction in the Pell grants under recent changes by the Bush administration to the formula used to calculate student aid eligibility. On December 23, 2004--just 2 days before the Christmas holiday, I might note--the Department of Education published updates to the allowance for state and other taxes that is used by students and their families to calculate their expected family contribution, or EFC, to college tuition. The EFC is the amount that students and their families are expected to contribute towards college in a given year. Changes in a student's 'expected family contribution' have a direct impact on that student's eligibility for a variety of types of financial aid. Simply put, as a student's expected family contribution goes up, their eligibility for financial aid goes down. The Administration's changes to the tax tables have the effect of cutting $300 million from the successful Pell grant program, upon which more than five million students nationwide rely. It is projected that, as a result of these cuts, 1.3 million students will see a reduction in their Pell grants and another 89,000 will become ineligible for Pell grant assistance.”