Trump’s Fury at Harvard Gets More Deranged—and Exposes a Big MAGA Scam

That’s because the “big, beautiful bill” that House Republicans passed last week—which Trump has urged Senate Republicans to adopt—could make attending college harder for countless such kids. For a detailed summary of its changes, see this piece by The New Republic’s Monica Potts: They would make it harder for full-time students to qualify for Pell Grants, bump off large numbers of part-time students, and restrict access to the program and other financial assistance for higher education in numerous other ways.

Indeed, a coalition of education advocacy organizations estimates that the bill’s changes to Pell Grants alone could deprive as many as 700,000 people of eligibility entirely, and hit many more with higher costs. As Potts summarizes, all this “takes an ax to one of the few reliable ladders for working-class people seeking higher education” as an “engine for social mobility.” These are mostly poorer and working-class students by definition, many with jobs or young kids of their own.

“Across multiple education provisions in this bill, the data is clear: Millions of college students will wind up paying a lot more, and low-income students will be by far the hardest hit,” Jonathan Fansmith, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education, told me. “Hundreds of thousands of them will lose financial aid eligibility and their ability to afford college in the first place.”