SAFRA update

On Sunday, HR 4872 was passed. It's important for those of us watching for federal grant opportunities to know what's coming down the pipeline from this piece of legislation.

Here is an excerpt from an article on insidehighered.com:
Gone -- due to diminished projections of the savings generated by the loan overhaul and the need to balance out health care spending in the overall bill -- are billions of dollars to reduce the interest rate on students' loan payments, remake the Perkins Loan Program, and fund President Obama's American Graduation Initiative, aimed at helping community colleges graduate 5 million more students by 2020.


Also sacrificed to practical realities are most of the Obama administration's efforts to prod recipients of the new federal money to change their practices, through accountability provisions that would have been part of the American Graduation Initiative and the proposed $2.5 billion College Access and Completion Fund, which has been jettisoned in favor of a smaller $750 million expansion of the existing College Access Challenge Grant Program.


Thanks to a last-minute scramble to find some new money to help community colleges meet exploding demand for enrollment amid state and local budget cuts, the final version of the legislation retains $2 billion to fund a Department of Labor career training program that was created in last year's economic stimulus bill but never funded. It would direct $2.55 billion over 10 years to historically black, Hispanic-serving, and tribal colleges. And it would provide about $1.5 billion to expand income-based repayment options for student loan borrowers.

You can view the full article here: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/22/safra