Mandatory Pell Grant funding a plus for Georgia students (w/audio clip)

President Obama revealed his 2010 budget plan last week, with a heavy emphasis on higher education.

The new plan would create mandatory funding for Pell Grants and increase funding for Perkins loans, among other things.

So what would this all mean for college students?

“It’s definitely going to be a big deal,” said Ryan Lavner, a senior at the University of Georgia, and native of Canandaigua, New York.

“It may not actually affect me because I’m graduating, but my sister wants to come down here to go to school. Putting me through school has kind of broken my parents. Not broken, but it was a big financial strain.”

Obama’s new plan would help Pell Grant funding better correlate with the Consumer Price Index, a key indicator of the economies success or failure. It would become part of the new president’s goal to make the United States the country with the highest college graduation rate in the world by 2020.

“There are too many students who are unprepared for college, and too many that can’t afford it,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the Associated Press.

With a large number of Georgia’s in-state post-secondary students receiving money from the HOPE program, the impact of Obama’s new plan may not be felt as largely in the state. But, students say, it will definitely help in the current hard economic times.

“It’s huge,” said James McCoy, a student at Athens’ Gainesville State College campus.

“I’m probably not graduating any time soon, and I don’t have hope, so if this goes through it could definitely help my parents. My dad [the superintendent of Commerce County schools] has already had to make some layoffs and took a big pay cut himself. And my brother’s in school too, and not on HOPE either.”

Said Koleen Sullivan, a junior at UGA: “This would be so big. I’m from Atlanta and on HOPE, but I know a lot of people that are struggling to make ends-meet and still get through college and get the education they need to succeed in the world.”

Obama’s Pell Grant plan would aim at having funds for any potential student that qualifies, an area where he said the current program has been lacking. His budget also includes a new $2.5 billion Access and Completion Fund for states that show new strategies for improving college graduation rates for low-income students.

That, Lavner said, would be a huge step forward.

“My family isn’t poor, but we’re not exactly ‘well off,’” he said. “My parents have made a lot of sacrifices to send me to the school I wanted, and needed, to go to. Education is vitally important, and it’s time for the country to provide more help.”

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