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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.

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

So you can go to college on Pell Grants - maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it's turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century.

Funding and maintaining programs from Head Start to Pell Grants must be a high priority.

Pell Grants open a lot of doors, but they rely on a solvent government.

The Republicans claim they are for strengthening Pell grants when the truth is that over the last four years, their legislation has done the exact opposite.

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 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.

When Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell first proposed the grants that now bear his name, he envisioned a way to help students attend our country's wonderful colleges and universities, so they could share in the American Dream.