Reps. Rush Holt and Frank Pallone Jr. highlight need for government aid at annual Tent State University
Pell grants were originally intended to pay about 80 percent of a student’s expenses at a state university, Holt said. Now, he said, the maximum grant of about $5,800 pays less than 50 percent, and the budget recently passed by the House (awaiting action in the Senate) would take the level down to about 12 percent.
“If you want to make up the remaining 88 percent with loans and work …well, you just can’t do it,” Holt said.
Holt was on hand to kick off the annual Tent State University, an international student movement that brings students and others together on Rutgers’ Voorhees Mall for a week in April to advocate on behalf of increased college education funding. Tent State began at Rutgers in 2003 in response to the impending invasion of Iraq as well as unprecedented budget cuts to higher education in New Jersey. It is coordinated by the Rutgers Student Union, which rents tents for $5 to willing participants with the goal of building a unified coalition.
Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), joined Tent Staters on College Avenue to perform the official ribbon cutting for the event. He commended the students for speaking out and dedicating their time to influencing policymakers in New Jersey and Washington. “I want to show solidarity with the student leaders who call for the state and federal governments to support higher education,” he said.
Holt called the idea of cutting back on education in lean times a “false economy.” He said the GI Bill of Rights was passed by Congress in 1944, when the country was at war and in worse debt than it faces now. “You hear talk about our deficit and our horrible debt; it was huge then, bigger than now,” Holt said “But … what the country did in 1944, instead of saying, ‘Oh, my God, we’re in debt, we just can’t do anything,’ they passed the GI Bill and said, ‘We’re going to send more than a million soldiers to college. When they come back we’re going to pay their tuition and pay them to attend.’”
The GI Bill generated considerable economic benefit for the returning servicemen who took advantage of it and for the country. “It paid for itself many times over,” he said.
About 50 students heard Holt speak. The buildings lining Voorhees Mall, he said, probably contained hundreds of students who didn’t know their Pell grants and other federal aid were in danger of being eliminated.
“You know, I looked it up, and there are 9,118 students at Rutgers in New Brunswick who receive federal aid,” Holt said. “That’s $35 million, just in New Brunswick. Rutgers aid, overall, amounts to $56 million. “So, yell and scream. Let people know that you … actually have some political force.”
Tamala Chipeta, the lead organizer in the legislative tent, said that if the Pell grants were cut, she might consider not going to college. “I have no other way to pay,” said the first-year student who is aspiring to a career in public health.
Jordan Bucey, from Cincinnati, a religion major and Tent State’s public relations coordinator, said: “I was a student here; I left because I couldn’t afford the tuition. I’m now at Middlesex County College and working for the Second Reformed Church, right over there” – she gestured across College Avenue. “I live in Trinity House, here in New Brunswick, and I hope to come back to Rutgers eventually.” She hopes to become a minister.