Paul Ryan Tells Student He Should Work Three Jobs To Pay For College, Not Use Pell Grants

By Travis Waldron and Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

The House Republican majority, since it came into power, has repeatedly set its sights on Pell Grants, the federal grants that help low- and middle-income students pay a portion of their higher education tuition. Republicans have not only proposed lowering the maximum Pell amount from $5,500 (which is the level to which the Obama administration raised it) but also limiting eligibility, knocking one million students from the Pell program entirely.

During a town hall today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) was asked by Matthew Lowe, a student, why the GOP wants to cut Pell Grants. Ryan responded by saying that the program is “unsustainable,” before telling Lowe that he should be working three jobs and taking out student loans to pay for college, instead of using Pell Grants:

LOWE: I come from a very middle-class family and under President Obama, I get $5,500 per year to pay for school, which doesn’t come close to covering all of the funding, but it helps ease the burden. Under your plan, you cut it by 15 percent. I was just curious why you would cut a grant that goes directly to the middle- and lower-class people that need it the most.

RYAN: ‘Cause Pell Grants have become unsustainable. It’s all borrowed money…Look, I worked three jobs to pay off my student loans after college. I didn’t get grants, I got loans, and we need to have a system of viable student loans to be able to do this.

The second concern I have is, in the health care bill — people don’t know this — for budgetary gimmickry reasons, the administration and Congress at the time, took over the student loan industry. So they had the federal government, the Department of Education, basically confiscate the private student loan industry.

Watch it:

ThinkProgress spoke to Lowe afterward, who said, “If [the Pell grant program] was cut, I’d have to accept unsubsidized loans from banks. I don’t get it…We continue to not tax the people who are best off…He taxes small little things that affect the poor and middle class the most.”

Ryan justified the GOP’s desire to cut the highly-necessary Pell Grant program by claiming that it costs too much; but the GOP’s budget provides huge tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations which dwarf the cost of preserving the grants. He also claimed that Pell Grants drive tuition inflation, which is a claim he has made before, while pointing to studies that didn’t actually say what he believed they said.

Finally, Ryan goes from claiming that Pell Grants are unaffordable to saying that he wants to repeal student loan reform (which was in no way passed for a “budgetary gimmicky reason”) that saves taxpayers billions of dollars each year by cutting unnecessary subsidies to banks that originated federal student loans. Contrary to Ryan’s assertion, there is still a private student loan industry; loan reform merely cut the banks out of the federal student loan program.

At a time when student loan debt is hitting new heights and joblessness is above nine percent, Ryan’s response to a student genuinely concerned about financing his higher education is quite telling. To Ryan, students should have to live the real American dream of working three jobs in order to pay back a mountain of cash to a bank.

Virginia attorney general instructs state colleges to stop protecting gay students from discrimination.

By Igor Volsky Just weeks after Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) refused to renew an executive order that would have protected gay and lesbian state workers from discrimination, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is asking the state’s colleges and universities “to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.” Cuccinelli — who has previously argued “homosexual acts are…intrinsically wrong” — wrote a letter to all of the state’s public colleges and universities:

“It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including ’sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ ‘gender expression,’ or like classification as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy absent specific authorization from the General Assembly,” he wrote. Colleges that have included such language in their policies — which include all of Virginia’s leading schools — have done so “without proper authority” and should “take appropriate actions to bring their policies in conformance with the law and public policy of Virginia,” Cuccinelli wrote.

Most colleges protect gays from anti-discrimination and violence. Earlier this month, students at John Carroll University, a Jesuit college in Cleveland Ohio, staged a sit-in to protest “the university’s decisions not to include the protection of sexual orientation of in its anti-discrimination statement.” Other Jesuit universities, like “Canisius College, College of the Holy Cross, Georgetown University, Gonzaga University, Le Moyne College, and St. Louis University” all include “sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination policies.” The blogger Joe.My.God. writes, “Virginia is going to have a VERY hard time attracting top students and faculty after this, not to mention the inevitable backlash against people or companies willing to work with the Virginia higher education system.”

M.C.L.comment: I told you liberals when you stay at home and let the misinform and stupid to vote this is what you get, you got a right wing governor that's trying to turn back the social clock 40 years.