President Obama recently signed into law the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which will increase financial aid for students by $61 billion.

The law increases the maximum Pell Grant to $5,975 by 2017 so that more students can attend College without the looming threat of crushing debt.  The law also expands the Income Based Repayment program which will allow over one million additional students the ability to manage their debt load after graduation.

And perhaps best of all, it won't cost taxpayers a dime because it's funded by cutting wasteful hand-outs to banks and loan companies like Sallie Mae and Citibank. By ending these corporate hand-outs, Congress voted to support students, not Wall Street banks.

OSPIRG student chapter money was not used to lobby for this bill. 

Higher Education Associate Rich Williams pictured with David Bergeron, Director of Policy and Budget Development, and acting Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education.

However, OSPIRG's staff and students spent over a decade working with groups like OSA and USSA to demonstrate the need to end wasteful loan subsidies to lenders.

Throughout that time, the financial and political clout of lenders like Sallie Mae had stymied meaningful action. In early 2005, the tide began to turn. Public opinion was starting to rally around college affordability in a big way. We theorized that we could tap into that enough to overwhelm Sallie Mae’s clout and shift the political winds in our favor.

So we launched a campaign in 2005 called Student Debt Alert, the perfect "one-two punch" of student activism and professional staff.

Over the years, our Federal Higher Education Advocate (first Luke Swarthout, then Rich Williams, both in the pictures) authored several research reports that broke down the problem and solutions in a way that was easy for the public to understand. He met with key Washington DC players on this issue – education associations, government officials, reporters and members of Congress – and worked to persuade them to support our policy solutions.  

Meanwhile, students in Oregon and around the country mobilized, releasing our research to the local media, packing local government hearings with students, and collecting thousands of personal testimonies of the problems of student debt.  Our work precipitated news story after news story about the problems of student debt and financial aid.   To be sure all this was heard in DC, our Advocate personally sent every press clip and testimony to the Washington DC insiders.

Our first breakthrough occurred in the fall of 2007 when the new Congressional leadership announced that they would enact many of the very policy solutions we had been calling for.  Then ended up pushing through a large expansion of the Pell Grant program.  They also indicated their intent to push for the eventual end of wasteful loan subsidies to big banks, freeing up billions more for financial aid. 

Momentum has only been building ever since, coming to a head this March.

Insiders in Congress tell us that the continuous research and policy arguments of student advocates from PIRG and USSA year after year, combined with the impressive size and discipline of the students’ grassroots operation made the difference.