GOP Proposal Threatens Pell Grants for Online & Part-Time Students

For decades, the Pell Grant has served as the cornerstone of financial aid programs and a lifeline for low-income college students, supporting 92 percent of recipients from families who earn less than $60,000, as we discussed in our recent article “How Much Free College Aid Went Unclaimed Last Year?”

But a new proposal in the U.S. House of Representatives’ budget reconciliation bill—passed in the middle of the night by only one vote—could put that lifeline out of reach for more than a million college students who attend online programs, study part-time, or balance school with work and family responsibilities.

Buried deep in the fine print of the reconciliation bill that’s currently under debate in the Senate is a major shift in the way Pell Grants are awarded. Under the proposed change, instead of 24 credit hours per academic year, students would have to complete 30 credit hours—15 hours per semester—to qualify for the maximum full-time Pell Grant award of roughly $7,400. That’s a substantial 25 percent jump from the current threshold of 12 credits per semester, long considered the standard for full-time enrollment during the past century by colleges, the Carnegie Foundation, accrediting boards, and since 198,0 the U.S. Department of Education.

College administrators and higher education advocates warn that this sudden and unexpected redefinition would strip eligibility from more than a million students. In practice, it could deny full Pell awards to students who are, by every current metric, full-time learners. Many of them already stretch themselves thin to survive twelve credits, balancing work, family responsibilities, and rising living costs. These students need more help to pay for their college education, not less.

This change wouldn’t only reduce award amounts. For students taking fewer than 7.5 credits—less than a half-time course load—it would eliminate Pell eligibility entirely according to § 30031(b)(3) of the bill. That’s a colossal shift that could potentially redefine the student population eligible for financial aid.

The most immediate casualties of the proposed change would be online and part-time students. These students make up a growing share of the higher education landscape, particularly at open-access institutions like community colleges as well as many regional public universities.

As a recent Center for American Progress (CAP) analysis put it, “This change would disproportionately harm the very students the Pell Grant is intended to support.” They’re more likely to be adult learners, first-generation students, and working parents. Along with traditional-age students from low-income families, these are the demographics the Pell Grant was originally designed to serve in the 1970s by Rhode Island’s Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell, the famous architect of the expanded Basic Educational Opportunity Grant program that today bears his name.

For these students, the flexibility to take fewer courses at a time isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. According to IPEDS data from the Education Department, part-time enrollment is especially common in online programs, where students often work full-time jobs or care for dependents while they go back to college later as adults. If the credit-hour requirement suddenly jumps to thirty hours per year, these students would be left with a daunting choice: lose the full financial aid to which they’re currently entitled, or risk burnout by overloading their course schedules.

Only about 36 percent of Pell awardees take 30 semester credit-hours or more in a single year, including only one-fifth of community college students. That means only about 2.5 million of the roughly 6.9 million Pell Grant recipients across the nation would have qualified as full-time students under the GOP’s new definition.

What about the remaining 4.4 million? The GOP plan would prorate their Pell funding proportionate to the number of their credit-hours. Unfortunately, about 20 percent or 1.4 million of the current recipients would completely lose their Pell Grants because of the new half-time enrollment requirement.

Community college students would be hit particularly hard because most of the Pell awardees currently enrolled at two-year institutions would entirely lose their funding. Those students comprise about one-third or 810,000 of the 2.5 million community college Pell recipients. But four-year institutions with the largest proportions of Pell recipients, like Arizona State University, would also find themselves severely impacted.

Dr. Sara Partridge, the associate director of higher education policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC and an expert on public and minority-serving institutions, points out that the GOP’s planned cost increases would be substantial. The data shows that 44 percent of Pell recipients, or three million students, including 1.1 million at community colleges, would all see annual award reductions of up to $1,480.

This change would immediately drive up the total cost for an associate degree by $3,700—and the cost for a bachelor’s degree by a whopping $7,400.

Sure, students could always bridge this gap by taking on more student loans, but there are a couple of problems with this approach. First, this would be a new and unfamiliar option for most community college students because only about 15 percent of this population traditionally have taken out student loans to pay for their education.

Second, students from low-income families admitted to elite private colleges with so-called “need-blind” admissions policies, like Northwestern University, could find themselves affected as well. These students could end up maxing out their financial aid options under the GOP plan, which establishes tighter limits on federal Direct Loans. These students could end up relegated to private student loan providers, and the Student Borrower Protection Center cautions that private loans have none of the borrower protections or student loan forgiveness incentives offered within the Direct Loans program.

Some observers fear that by tethering aid to unrealistic course loads, the GOP’s proposal punishes students who can’t afford full-time attendance. Dr. Partridge also points out a hidden and potentially unintended consequence of the GOP’s policy shift that probably never occurred to lawmakers in the House: that taking on more debt or a greater course load could force many students to give up some of their hours spent working:

These proposed changes would put Pell Grant recipients in challenging circumstances by forcing them to either take on more debt or more hours of coursework. Both options would likely raise costs for many students: Enrolling in more courses would likely force some students to work fewer hours outside of school, which would strain them further financially.

In a 2023 survey of student basic needs from The Hope Center at Temple University, 52 percent of students reported having one job, and 16 percent reported having two or more. Of employed students, 32 percent reported working 20 or more hours per week.

With more than half of students working outside of school already, many may face challenges finding the time to take on more courses while sustaining themselves as they complete school. In addition, significant shares of students—23 percent in the same survey—reported being parents or primary caregivers. Today’s students have significant financial needs and familial obligations, which indicates that many may not have the time to take on additional coursework per semester.

Since the early 1900s, federal policy has defined full-time college attendance as enrollment in at least twelve credit hours per semester. As we discussed in one of our 2023 articles, that definition rooted in Carnegie Unit standards has shaped nearly everything across American higher education, from on-campus housing eligibility to tuition and financial aid.

The idea was simple: twelve credits approximated a full-time weekly commitment to coursework that would require an average of at least two hours of study time for every hour spent in class. The twelve hours of class time plus study time amounted to 36 hours, just under a 40-hour work week, which became standard in many occupations after World War II. This full load would still reasonably enable students to balance coursework with about 10 to 15 hours of part-time work or other responsibilities during evenings and on weekends.

That’s why the proposed jump to 15 credits is so jarring. It marks a departure not only from historical practice but from the current lived reality of millions of students. Although the 15-credit-hour policy has always aligned better with four-year graduation timelines, it doesn’t reflect how most students—especially those attending online or part-time programs—navigate college in 2025 during the post-Covid era when only about a quarter of all students across the nation attend college full-time and on campuses.

Community college leaders have been quick to warn that such a change would have a “colossal impact” on their campuses. As AACC’s government relations executives emphasized in their recent webinar for college administrators, almost all students currently receiving the maximum Pell award are enrolled in fewer than fifteen hours per semester.

Indeed, the GOP’s policy change could decimate enrollments at many two-year institutions. David Baime, AACC’s senior vice president for government relations at the association’s Washington DC office, said during the webinar that this change needs to be removed from the reconciliation bill “at all costs.”

The GOP’s proposal is also troubling from an equity perspective, given that community colleges serve so many low-income, first-generation, and minority students, especially in huge states with diverse student populations like California, Texas, and Florida. A policy that restricts Pell funding based on a 15-credit-hour requirement risks reinforcing existing inequalities, not reducing them.

For all the alarm surrounding its proposed restrictions, there are a few bright spots in the House reconciliation bill—especially for advocates of job training and workforce development. Notably, the bill includes short-term Pell Grants, a long-standing request from AACC. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that by 2033, about 100,000 students would enroll in these short-term programs every year if legislation were enacted that enabled students to use their Pell Grants to pay for them.

These grants would expand Pell eligibility to short-term credential programs intended to lead more directly to employment. These are time-intensive programs requiring between 150 and 600 hours of instruction over 8 to 15 weeks, and appear at § 30032(b)(3)(A). The inclusion of workforce-oriented metrics—such as job placement rates and earnings outcomes—mirrors bipartisan legislation introduced in previous sessions of Congress and supported by GOP lawmakers representing districts with large low-income populations.

Still, not all of this section within the bill exactly inspires confidence. The inclusion of non-higher education providers raises red flags. Some higher education leaders worry this provision could open the floodgates to for-profit training programs with limited accountability, diluting the value of Pell Grants and potentially wasting students’ time and tuition dollars on courses that aren’t worthwhile.

CAP’s analysis suggests that some students might be able to replace lost funding no longer available from traditional Pell Grants with this short-term Pell funding that supports enrollment in these training courses. The danger is that these programs have been found in many studies to offer poor educational quality and low earnings premiums when compared with bachelor’s degrees. There’s also a steep opportunity cost to these programs because they force students to forgo career paths with greater earning potential.

In short, although the reconciliation bill does respond to calls for more flexible and workforce-aligned grant aid, it does so within a training framework that bachelor’s degree candidates will likely conclude isn’t worth their additional time and effort.

GOP lawmakers also earmarked $10.5 billion to cover a looming Pell Grant funding shortfall that wasn’t anticipated during the Biden Administration’s final appropriations round, which happened more than a year ago. Although not a structural expansion, such a large investment signals that Pell remains a budget priority for Republicans despite partisan battles over eligibility criteria. Democrats in both the House and the Senate, not surprisingly, are united in their fierce opposition to the eligibility changes.

Finally, it remains unclear when or even if this bill will pass in its current form. The GOP needs 51 votes for Senate passage, but only holds 53 seats. Moreover, at least two of its senators—Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky—have vowed to vote against the bill.

And with such slim margins, the senators might need as much time as they can get for negotiations. But if they don’t pass the bill in some form by the end of August, they’re risking a government shutdown because of the federal debt ceiling. Some commentators already believe a short-term appropriations bill will be necessary because they don’t think the reconciliation bill will pass before October, only weeks prior to off-year elections in some states.