The U.S. House of Representatives has passed H.R. 2669, the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, which would reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HEA). The bill would eliminate nearly $19 billion in student loan lender subsidies and use the money to increase the maximum Pell Grant amount by $500 over five years and finance a series of measures aimed at making college loans more affordable.

 
The bill would create a new loan forgiveness program for new borrowers (as of October 1, 2007) who are employed in certain public-sector jobs in areas of national need, including speech-language pathology, law enforcement, public safety, emergency management, public health, early childhood and bilingual education, nursing, social work and child welfare, public interest legal services, and library science. According to the report that accompanied the bill, this program would allow, “for each year of full-time employment, a borrower would have up to $1,000 of his or her loans forgiven, up to a lifetime maximum of $5,000.”
 
The future prognosis for the bill and the loan forgiveness program is unclear. The Senate’s version of this bill does not contain the loan forgiveness program. Further, while the Bush Administration, “supports reducing excess subsidies in the student loan programs and increasing aid to the neediest students”, in a recently released statement on H.R. 2669, his senior advisors recommend that President Bush “veto the bill because it fails to target aid to the neediest students currently in college and creates new mandatory Federal programs and policies that are poorly designed and would have significant long-term costs to the taxpayer.”
 
Thank you to the hundreds of ASHA members who sent e-mails and letters to their U.S. Representatives in support of including SLPs in the loan forgiveness program. ASHA members should look for continuing updates on the progress of this legislation. For further information or questions about the bill or the proposed loan forgiveness program, please contact Neil Snyder, ASHA’s Director of Federal Advocacy, via e-mail at nsnyder@asha.org or by phone at 800-498-2071, ext. 4257.