Ashlee Whritenour

Contributing Writer

If you walk around the campus of East Stroudsburg University, a public university in Pennsylvania’s state system with about 5,800 undergrads, you might not realize that nearly half of the students you see rely on Pell Grants just to be there. The Pell Grant doesn’t just help a small slice of students at the very margins. At ESU, it’s pretty much the average experience.

The cost of the path to higher education right now is truly staggering: in-state tuition and fees run about $11,236 a year, then another $11,880 on top of that for room and board. That’s over $23,000 for one year of education. ESU and many other institutions are four-year schools, so in order to obtain a bachelor’s degree, you would have to multiply that 23,000 by four – and ESU is actually one of the cheapest universities in the state of Pennsylvania! Yet for a lot of families, that price alone is the difference between “maybe” and “no.”

I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York, in a low-income family, and I’m the first person in my family to go to college. For a long time I thought that, no matter the circumstances, if you worked hard and put in a lot of effort, you could always get the education that you deserve.

What I’ve actually learned is that none of that effort matters if the financial pieces don’t come together first. I’m only at ESU because of a combination of aid that all had to work in sync: the Federal Pell Grant, work-study and subsidized loans. Pull one piece out and the rest won’t hold.

That combination of student aid is exactly what’s under threat right now. More than 7 million students nationwide depend on Pell Grants, and the program is facing a $17 billion funding shortfall over the next two years.

Some lawmakers aren’t just talking about a small trim to the Pell Grant — they’re talking about eliminating subsidized loans entirely and pushing work-study funding to absorb the gap that leaves behind. That’s not just a minor adjustment. That’s asking one part of a student’s aid package to do the job of three, at a school where half of us are already stretched thin.

Pell was already falling behind before any of this. When the program started, the maximum Pell Grant covered about 75% of the cost of attending a four-year public college. Today it covers around 27%. While tuition and cost of living rates have continued to climb, the aid that’s supposed to keep pace with them hasn’t.

At ESU, where a large share of students come from low-income backgrounds, that gap doesn’t stay abstract — it shows up as more debt, more hours at a job on top of classes, and more students making the gut-wrenching decision that they can’t afford to come back next semester.

ESU is considered to be one of the more financially stable schools in Pennsylvania’s state system right now. If a school in a relatively strong position still can’t absorb a federal Pell cut without students feeling it directly, that tells you something about what this would do to students at schools with less cushion.

We all know how Congress tends to handle things like this. They wait, avoid taking a real position and only react once the damage is already done causing millions of people to be left living with the consequences. That’s exactly why students need to be loud about this now, before the decision is finalized.

This isn’t one program having a bad budget cycle. It’s a threat to the entire aid system that schools like ESU depend on to make college possible for the students they actually serve. For a lot of us, aid isn’t what makes college more comfortable. It’s the reason we’re enrolled at all.

If Congress cuts the Pell Grant, the choice for the next ESU student in my position won’t be between two schools. It’ll be a choice between taking on more debt than they can realistically pay off, or not going to college at all.

Congress must fully fund the Pell Grant program immediately to close the $17 billion shortfall, and to not close that gap by gutting Federal Work-Study or eliminating subsidized loans. In the longer term, Congress must pass the Pell Grant Preservation and Expansion Act, which would double the maximum grant so that it would reflect what college actually costs now, and would move Pell out of the annual budget fight for good. Students at schools like mine shouldn’t be left wondering every year whether their aid will still be there.

If you’re a Pennsylvania student who depends on financial aid to attend college, this is your fight too. Those in power want to keep us quiet and unassuming. We can’t keep letting them fill their pockets with our compliance.

Tell Congress your story. Tell them what you know, as a student, from your lived experience. Tell them that, if they don’t invest in us, they’ll be forcing us to choose between drowning in debt or dropping out of school. There is a way for us to succeed, but only if Congress is willing to help us.