The Missouri House on Monday approved a plan for the partial sale of Missouri’s student loan agency amid new political maneuvering over how the money should be spent.

The latest plan — which already contains enough hot-button issues to sink the most laudable of bills — picked up additional baggage when House Republicans linked it to a controversial bill that would shift some future higher education spending to private colleges.

The bill approved Monday would allow the state to spend $450 million it hopes to receive from the partial sale of the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority. More than $300 million would go toward construction projects to enhance life sciences research at state universities and community colleges.

An additional $69 million would go to pay down the state’s higher-education debt. That provision replaced the part of a previous House plan that would have used $75 million to fund a women’s prison in Chillicothe.

The bill would use $12.3 million to fund a scholarship endowment and an estimated $16.5 million — including $8.9 million in interest earnings — to fund a scholarship program the House voted to create earlier this month.

Democrats complained that the Republicans were pushing a fantasy plan. They pointed out that the loan authority’s board doesn’t know whether its plan to sell assets and donate the money to the state is legal. And the loan authority’s staff doesn’t know whether the authority has the financial wherewithal to do it.

The House rejected efforts to add restrictions on the funding until an independent analysis could determine whether the plan would undermine the loan authority’s purpose, which is to help students obtain federally subsidized loans.

If the money does come through, the latest plan prohibits the expenditure of funds to build or equip laboratories that would conduct research on early stem cells or use cutting-edge laboratory techniques to copy human cells.

The latest hot-button issue is the House Republicans’ plan to reshape higher-education funding. House Speaker Rod Jetton, a Marble Hill Republican, said House Republicans want the Senate to approve the higher-education bill and send it to the governor before the House will consider a final plan for spending the money from the loan authority.

The higher-education plan would direct future increases in state support for higher education into scholarship programs that students could use at public or private universities. Critics call the plan a way to shift tax money into private education.

“We want to get more money to students and to make schools compete for students,” Jetton said. “They have to prove to the students that they offer the courses and the programs are attractive to students. If they do that, they will get more money than they would if we appropriated it to them.”

Source: kansascity.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Student Loan. Tags: College, Education, Loans, Scholarship, Student, Student Loan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.