Your Georgetown education is costing you a lot of money, but you already know that. If you’re keeping up with campus affairs, you also know that in the course of putting together the federal budget, Congress decided to cut student aid—by a lot—and that Georgetown students fought back against “the Raid on Student Aid.” What you may not know is that the man behind these cuts is now the most important Congressman in the House of Representatives—and he’s likely to keep cutting.
Representative John Boehner (R-Oh.) was elected majority leader two weeks ago. To predict his legislative agenda for the next year, we should take a look at his past actions. Boehner has always been known as a pro-business representative, supporting the Chamber of Commerce on 95 percent of votes and the National Federation of Independent Business on 100 percent. More importantly, the specific businesses he supported were for-profit education companies and student loan providers.
During the raid on student aid, Boehner was chairman of the Education and Labor Committee. He cut government subsidies for the loans by $13 billion over the next five years, raised interest rates on the loans—effectively forcing students and parents to pay hundreds more yearly—and ended a program where universities could lend money to their own students, limiting student access to lenders.
These lenders, of course, have given tons of money to Boehner’s campaigns and his Poitical Action Committee, the Freedom Project. Sallie Mae, the largest student loan provider, has given $122,470. And although the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office have performed studies showing that a federal direct-lending program would save nine cents on every dollar loaned, I doubt we’ll see the success of any legislation that would create such a program.
A direct lending program, eliminating middlemen like Sallie Mae, would save the government $3 billion a year. As a conservative, Boehner might support a plan to cut government spending, but as a business-funded Congressman, he’s loath to do anything to hurt his allies in the lending business.
Now that Boehner is majority leader, students can look forward to seeing more legislation that favors businesses over students. In a New York Times story about Boehner’s new role as leader, former Representative Dick Armey (R-Tx.) noted that Boehner will be able to push his pet legislation past more reluctant members of Congress.
“Boehner, as Education and Labor [Chairman], would have lost,” Armey told the Times. “Boehner as majority leader will likely win.”
“I know that a lot of people wish that every day were Christmas and I were Santa Claus, but its not, and I’m not,” Boehner said during last year’s budget hearings.
But it doesn’t take the generosity of Santa Claus to make sure students get the support they need for college—it just takes the public policy foresight to realize that our country is better off with equal access to education.
