The Math Washington Refuses to Do
There's a paradox sitting at the center of the Pell Grant crisis that nobody in the Department of Education wants to discuss out loud: the program is technically succeeding by every metric it was designed to optimize, and it's heading toward collapse precisely because of that success.
The Hill reported this week that nearly 2 million additional students now qualify for Pell Grants, creating a funding shortfall that Congress will have to address — or ignore, which is the more historically accurate prediction. Eligibility was expanded. More students qualify. The money isn't there. Simple arithmetic, except in Washington, arithmetic is always someone else's problem.
The Pell Grant was created in 1972 under the Higher Education Act as a foundational need-based aid program. It was designed to help low-income students access post-secondary education. Fifty-four years later, it has become something else entirely: a federal subsidy mechanism that inflates tuition, distorts institutional incentives, and is perpetually underfunded because Congress expanded eligibility without expanding the appropriation to match.
The Bennett Hypothesis, Vindicated Again
In 1987, then-Secretary of Education William Bennett argued — and was pilloried for arguing — that federal financial aid was fueling tuition inflation rather than solving the affordability crisis. His logic was straightforward: if universities know students can access more federal money, they'll raise prices to capture that money. The market signal that normally constrains prices gets muffled by the federal backstop.
Thirty-nine years of tuition data have proven Bennett more right than his critics would like to admit. Between 1987 and today, the average cost of a four-year public university has increased by more than 200 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Pell Grant funding has increased substantially over that same period. Tuition has outpaced it every time. The more federal money poured in, the faster prices climbed.
Now we're watching the logical endpoint of that dynamic: a program expanded to serve 2 million more students, attached to an institution that responded to increased demand by raising prices rather than controlling costs, funded by a Congress that made promises without writing the check.
The students caught in the middle are real people. I understand that. A first-generation college student from rural Alabama who qualifies for a Pell Grant and plans around it isn't responsible for the structural failure that produced this crisis. The blame belongs entirely to the federal apparatus that created a dependency without designing a sustainable mechanism to maintain it.
What the Constitution Actually Says About This
There is no constitutional provision authorizing the federal government to fund higher education. None. The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government. Education is not among the enumerated powers.
This isn't merely a legal technicality. It's the reason federal education programs consistently fail to solve the problems they claim to address. When the federal government finances something, it simultaneously removes the incentive for states and institutions to discipline their own spending, disrupts the price signals that would otherwise allocate resources efficiently, and creates constituencies that lobby for expansion of the program regardless of its actual performance.
The Pell Grant shortfall is exactly this dynamic in motion. Congress expanded eligibility — generating political goodwill — without funding the expansion — deferring the cost. The states didn't fill the gap because they'd long since ceded this territory to Washington. The universities didn't restrain tuition because federal money kept flowing. And now the students are told there's a shortfall, as though this were an act of God rather than a predictable outcome of a badly designed system.
The Conservative Alternative Nobody Will Propose
The solution the political establishment will propose is more money. It's always more money. Congress will hold hearings. Witnesses will testify about hardship. A bipartisan bill will restore funding. The structural problem will remain untouched, and we'll have this same conversation in five years when the next shortfall materializes.
The solution worth discussing is the one nobody in Washington will touch: a genuine devolution of higher education financing to states and private institutions, combined with meaningful price controls on institutions that receive any federal funds. If you take federal money, your tuition cannot increase faster than inflation. Full stop.
That's not radical. That's what any competent lender requires of anyone they're subsidizing. You don't get to take federal money and then raise prices to capture more of it. The fact that universities have been permitted to do exactly that for five decades is a policy failure of the first order.
The Pell Grant program has helped millions of students. That's real. But a program that helps students while simultaneously making college less affordable isn't a success — it's a subsidy to institutions that have failed to control costs, dressed up as aid to students. The two things aren't the same, and the distinction matters enormously when you're trying to fix a shortfall rather than just patch it.
