Beth Macy

Well, the Pell Grants are still in existence.

But what happened is college tuitions just began skyrocketing.

The federal government started cutting education in the 80s under Reagan who had a secretary of education named William Bennett –

who called the very notion of education as a portal to upward mobility, he called it sociological flammary.

And as tuition started going up and state budgets were having shortfalls in the 90s, state legislatures were also defunding higher ed.

And the Pell Grants, they...

rose a little but never commensurate with inflation, and the purchasing power of it just dwindled.

So now, if you're a kid like I was, proportionally poor as I was then, a Pell Grant would only pay about 30% of a state university cost.

And I wouldn't have been able to go.

Even 10 years later, I wouldn't have been able to go.

And my point in saying this is not only did it save my life, but I have paid that money back so many times through making more money and higher tax, you know, paying more in taxes.

And we know that the typical Pell student pays that money back within 10 years time.

So it's so short sighted to have basically taken this option away from poor folks.

Sure.

I mean, first of all, the numbers of kids that weren't showing up to school.

This, of course, got really bad during COVID.

So we were still seeing some post-COVID stuff.

But I mean, the amount of miles she had put on her car, like 100,000 miles in four years on her car.

And just driving from one end of the county to the other and picking kids up, getting them out of bed, giving them alarm clocks, rescuing children who had been sexually abused and taking them to social services.

The things she saw...