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Pell Grants aren't 'welfare,' they are a gateway to opportunity for some of our nation's best and brightest students.

Pell Grants are, and have been, critically important tools in making higher education a possibility for lower- and middle-income students.

The difficulty is, Pell Grants are an attempt to do the right thing, and that is to give the low-income student an opportunity to access higher education, and that's a good thing. And welfare was an attempt to help those most in need. The difficulty is, often times a program is so successful that it grows and grows and grows and grows.

Pell grants are the foundation of Federal student aid. As someone who attended college with the help of Pell grants and as chairman of the Pell Grant Caucus, I know how important they are for our Nation's low-income students.

It's one thing to make financial aid available to students so they can attend college. It's another thing to design forms that students can actually fill out.

I am here to give the American people some straight talk about higher education. Some have said we might have cut financial aid for college students. The truth is we have expanded access to college for our neediest students through the record growth of the Pell grant program.

We simply can't keep providing money from the federal government in the form of subsidized or actual loans and Pell Grants when we don't have the money.

Any cut to Pell Grants means low-income must take out additional loans or work longer hours - risk factors that increase their odds of dropping out of school.

I am going to put money into education at the expense of other programs.

If you're smart enough to go to college, you should be smart and creative enough to pay for it.