Content area
Full Text
Ask college leaders about President Bush's record on higher education during his first term, and many of them will respond, "What record?"
But that might not be entirely fair.
After all, Mr. Bush has pushed Congress to change the federal tax code to make it easier for students and their parents to save for college, provided modest increases in spending on historically black colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions, and lauded community colleges and promised them more money. The administration has also weighed in on some of higher education's most controversial issues, including the use of racial preferences in college admissions and efforts to achieve gender equity in intercollegiate athletics.
And over the past three-and-a-half years, Mr. Bush has asked Congress
to increase spending on Pell Grants, the government's primary source of aid for students from low-income families, by 47 percent.
Still, the maximum Pell Grant has remained stuck at $4,050 for the last two years because the appropriations have not been enough to keep up with an unexpected surge in demand for the awards, and it is likely to stay at the same level for 2005. The administration has not sought increases in the government's other major student-aid programs.
To understand the focus of the administration's education policy, one has only to look at the headquarters of the U.S. Education Department in Washington. Flanking the main entrance are models of a red, one-room schoolhouse, surrounded by a white picket fence -- a flourish added by administration officials soon after the president took office.
The symbolism speaks volumes about the president's priorities, says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. The president has "largely been indifferent to higher education," he says, as the administration has tried to achieve a central plank of the president's 2000 platform: reforming elementary and secondary education through the No Child Left Behind Act.
Administration officials and Republican-leaning college leaders, though, say it is a mistake to view the president's agenda for improving public schools as being entirely unrelated to his vision for higher education.
"The big winners from No Child Left Behind are going to be colleges," says Sally L. Stroup, the U.S. Education Department's assistant secretary for postsecondary education. "This...