Biden pushes Congress on college aid in budget plan

Just days after the US Congress belatedly finished the current-year federal budget, the Biden administration outlined next year’s request, seeking more student aid and research money while omitting more targeted help for community colleges and immigrants.

Joe Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget plan would increase by 26 per cent, to $8,670 (£6,620), the maximum per-student award under the Pell Grant programme, the main federal subsidy for low-income college students.

The administration also is seeking robust hikes in key science accounts, including increases of nearly 10 per cent for the National Institutes of Health and 19 per cent for the National Science Foundation.

Mr Biden did not, however, mention trying again on his 2020 campaign promise to make two-year public colleges free for students, or on his attempt last year to extend federal aid to students eligible for Daca, the protective status for immigrants brought to the US as children.

The federal fiscal year begins in October, and Congress just this month finished the fiscal 2022 budget. It included a 6 per cent increase in the Pell Grant, and gains of about 5 per cent for the NIH and 4 per cent for the NSF.

University leaders and student advocates generally praised the new fiscal 2023 plan and called on Congress – with Mr Biden’s fellow Democrats in charge of both chambers – to back its broad outlines. The Association of Community College Trustees did, however, lament the setback on more explicit commitments to the free-college idea and the Daca protections.

“It’s a missed opportunity,” the ACCT said of the free-college concept. Other new investments in the Biden budget plan, in areas that include assisting job-specific training in high schools and community colleges, “are a small down-payment on the investment previously proposed for our institutions”, the association said.

The Biden budget plan also asks Congress to push ahead on funding strategy, begun in the fiscal 2022 budget, to create new divisions at the NIH and NSF dedicated to finding more entrepreneurial outcomes from basic research discoveries. The new request includes $5 billion for the new medical science operation that would embrace the aggressive funding tactics of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Mr Biden did not, however, offer an opinion on the question dividing some in academic science of whether the Arpa-Health entity should be housed inside or outside the NIH bureaucracy.

Either way, groups promoting medical research complained that almost the entire 5 per cent gain suggested for the NIH would go to Arpa-H, leaving the traditional science functions of the NIH with almost no spending increase.

Republicans on the Education and Labor Committee of the US House of Representatives made clear they would fight Mr Biden on the budget plan as they try in 2022 to regain control of Congress. Yet their leader, Virginia Foxx, largely stuck to general criticisms, arguing in a brief statement that “policy atrocities are the forte of this administration”.

Her most specific complaint accused Mr Biden, while asking for more investment in job-specific postsecondary training, of not showing enough “urgency in reforms to improve opportunities in education and skills development for our future leaders”.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com