Sprinkled throughout the last-minute 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus federal spending bill that was signed right before Christmas by President Joe Biden, are funding provisions and policy changes that impact the world of higher education. The new legislation was welcomed by policy experts, although it did not contain everything that they had hoped for.
Dr. Dominique Baker, associate professor of education policy in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development at Southern Methodist University
One such compromise involved the Pell Grant, which President Biden had proposed increasing by over $2,000, part of a plan to double the maximum award by 2029. The omnibus bill raised it by $500—far from what Biden had asked for, but still the largest increase in over a decade.
“People should feel good that the Pell Grant is increasing as much as it is,” said Dr. Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “You always have to ask for more than you think you’re going to get.”
The bill includes a bounty for historically under-resourced institutions, including HBCUs and other minority serving institutions (MSIs): a $137 million funding increase. There’s also $50 million for infrastructure improvements at MSIs. According to Dr. Marybeth Gasman, associate dean for research in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University and executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, these funds are critical.
“MSIs have been starved of resources for far too long,” she wrote in an email to Diverse. “MSIs need infrastructure support and have been lacking it for decades.”
According to Gasman, the emphasis on MSIs is a relatively recent development.
